9 Stories You Should Know About Today, Dec. 26, 2014

Welcome to The Day After. We’ve just caught our breath after the manifold pleasures and surprises of Christmas and Hanukkah — pleasures, unless you were expecting a delivery from UPS or FedEx — and now, if ridership on BART this morning is any guide, the rush is on throughout the land to exchange gifts that weren’t perfect and/or take advantage of steep post-holiday discounts. Full story

Heated debates about gentrification have dominated the discussions leading up to the passage of three neighborhood-specific development plans this year, especially the ones for West Oakland and Lake Merritt, with critics arguing that the plans will accelerate the influx of higher-income residents to the East Bay. As a result, opponents said, rents will continue to skyrocket and the targeted neighborhoods will become unaffordable for many. Although 2014 was in some ways a productive year for tenants' rights in Oakland — with the city adopting two measures aimed at curbing mistreatment by landlords — activists worry that pro-tenant reforms have not kept pace with the speed of gentrification. Full story

Undeterred by chilly weather or the Christmas holiday, dozens of antipolice demonstrators marched through downtown Oakland on Thursday evening — some smashing windows of businesses in Jack London Square, throwing bottles, and even tearing ornaments and lights from a large Christmas tree —in the latest round of protests against what they see as police violence toward minorities. Full story

A day after the leaders of three Bay Area police unions denounced the “vilification” of officers in recent protests against the killings of black men, one group of protesters reacted coolly to the union leaders’ call for a “constructive dialogue.” “Let’s get police officers’ unions and other spokespeople to acknowledge there’s a problem, and maybe we can have a constructive dialogue,” Mike Wilson, a member of Occupy Oakland’s Demilitarize the Police Working Group, said Thursday. Full story

These are the human faces of the diminished winter harvests: Manuel Avila, Jorge Rivera, Adriana Garcia, Jessica Yanez, Salud Santacruz and more than 17,000 others who confront hunger due to reduced hours or lost jobs in food picking, processing and packing. Full story

Copious amounts of rain in late November and early December brought more than 100 fish into Marin, and scientists were hoping for a bumper crop of the species that has been in a steep decline. But despite the continuing rains, the number of fish returning from the sea has flattened and it looks to be a poor year for the coho. "What looked to be a great start didn't ramp up like we were hoping," said Eric Ettlinger, aquatic ecologist for the Marin Municipal Water District, which manages much of Mount Tamalpais. "It's looking pretty mediocre." Full story

In books by soldiers and reporters about Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s the details that slam home a sense of what the wars were like on the front lines: a suicide bomber’s head pulled from the rubble of the mosque he’d bombed; the sonogram of an unborn child found among a soldier’s remains; a bomb technician writing NKA (No Known Allergies) and his blood type on his boots in permanent marker “because feet survive detonations.” Full story

Cy Musiker and David Wiegand share their picks for great events around the Bay Area this week. Full story