9 Stories You Should Know About Today: Thursday, Jan. 8

Declaring that she “wants to come home to the state I love so much” — but that she’ll redouble her efforts on behalf of progressive causes — California Sen. Barbara Boxer announced Thursday that she will not seek a fifth term in office. Full story

The state agency responsible for ensuring Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and other utilities operate their natural-gas systems safely has a two-year backlog of unfinished investigations, and its probes are often poorly documented and seldom result in penalties against the companies, a federal audit has found. Full story

Whatever part inside of Tommy Caldwell that made him attempt the seemingly impossible — a free climb of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall — might have been born in 2000 when he and three others were kidnapped by militants while climbing in the Pamir-Alai range of Kyrgyzstan. They escaped after six days on the run when Caldwell shoved an armed guard over a cliff. Or it might have come shortly after, when Caldwell severed his left index finger with a table saw during a home renovation. Full story

Je suis Charlie? Well, not quite. I really am not Charlie Hebdo. Nothing - no cartoon, no book, no song – justifies the kind of shooting rampage that happened in Paris. ... But the spontaneous outpouring of the #JeSuisCharlie hashtags elides over the really thorny issue of free speech. While we want free speech to be absolute, in the real world, it is not. And even as we stand with Charlie Hebdo we cannot pretend not to understand that. Full story

Recent remarks by FBI Director James Comey suggest that officers are dying at the hands of criminals at a higher rate than in the past. But do the statistics support this “shocking increase?” Not really. While newly available data show that law enforcement deaths did rise from 2013 to 2014, a closer analysis shows that 2013 may have been the aberration, with an unusually low number of police deaths, while 2014 marked a return to the recent norm. Full story

Schools Superintendent Antwan Wilson is shaking up the city's worst performing schools by inviting charters and other groups to redesign and restart five of them by the fall of 2016. Parent meetings are happening this week and next at Castlemont, Fremont and McClymonds high schools and at Frick Middle School and Brookfield Elementary School, where officials will explain the new Intensive Support Schools Initiative. Full story

After two months in a row of declining conservation, Californians are doing better at saving water, but they remain far short of a goal set by Gov. Jerry Brown last January. Statewide, residents cut water use by 9.8 percent in November, compared with November 2013, according to new state figures released Tuesday. That's an improvement from October, when the reduction was only 6.8 percent. And it compares with the 11.5 percent savings in August, and 10.2 percent in September. Full story

Federal climate scientists confirmed today that 2014 stands as California’s warmest year on record. The state’s average temperature for the year clocked in at 61.5 degrees Fahrenheit, 4.1 degrees higher than the 20th century average. Last year’s average bested the previous record, set in 1934, by nearly two degrees. Full story

The true insulating power of otter fur comes from a layer of air the fur keeps trapped next to their skin. Otter fur has two special properties that make it especially good at creating an insulating layer of air: It’s dense, and it’s spiky. Full story

Last fall, a small Italian restaurant just across the bay from San Francisco decided that it had had enough of Yelp's famously aggressive sales tactics. In exchange for one-star reviews on Yelp, Bistro Botto, in Richmond, California, began offering 25 percent off any pizza back in September 2014. As of Thursday, that discount has gone up to 50 percent off any pizza. (The most expensive pizza on the menu is a large meat-laden Supercazzola, at $35.) Full story