8 Stories You Should Know About Today: Friday, Jan. 16

BART trains are now stopping at all stations and service is recovering from disruptions caused by anti-police brutality protests. KQED reporter Isabel Angell, who was at Powell Station, said the protesters there have disbanded after discussing among themselves what future actions they could take. Full story

A group of protesters chained themselves together and blocked the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building on Friday morning in downtown Oakland, saying they wanted to reclaim the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Pictures posted on Twitter showed more than a dozen protesters outside the building at 1301 Clay St., which houses federal offices and courthouses. Some had pipes covering their wrists and forearms that read, “3rd World Unite” and “Silence is Violence.” Full story

California’s health insurance marketplace is holding steady in signing Latinos up for coverage under the Affordable Care Act: 28 percent of people who have enrolled in a plan so far this season are Latino, according to data released at Covered California’s board meeting on Thursday. That’s exactly the same breakdown as last year, when the first open enrollment period closed. Latinos make up more than 60 percent of the uninsured population in California. Full story

Officers in the Metro special-enforcement unit, a crown jewel of the San Jose Police Department and one of its last vestiges of proactive policing, will be reassigned to backfill the struggling agency's street patrols, under plans announced internally this week. Officials say the move is intended to be temporary, starting Feb. 1 and lasting until mid- to late March, when the department hopes new cops will complete their field training and be available to fill the void. Full story

Heeding calls to conserve water from Gov. Jerry Brown and Mayor Ed Lee, water customers in the Bay Area served by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission cut use by 14 percent in 2014, according to data released this week. With the drought in its third year, Brown a year ago told Californians to cut water use by 20 percent. Lee asked San Francisco users -- which comprise some of the 2.6 million homes and businesses served by the SFPUC, which pipes in fresh drinking water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park -- for a 10 percent reduction. Full story

Supporters of the aspiring State of Jefferson returned to Sacramento on Thursday to present “declarations of separation” from three more Northern California counties. The petitions from Tehama, Glenn and Yuba counties, expressing their desire to withdraw from California because of a perceived lack of representation in the Legislature, bring the total number of breakaway counties to five. Jeffersonians rallied at the Capitol last August after presenting their initial declarations from Siskiyou and Modoc counties. Full story

When Google announced it was ending the Glass Explorer program yesterday and handing over the reins to Nest’s Tony Fadell, it seemed to exit with more of a whimper than a scream. Let’s face it, from its earliest days, people loved to hate Glass. In fact, from the moment Google announced Glass, people reacted harshly to the new technology. They simply hated the idea of nerds with computers on their faces who could take photos or videos surreptitiously. A new word, Glassholes, entered the popular lexicon to describe folks who wore Glass. Full story

The four remaining members of the Grateful Dead will reunite to celebrate the band's 50th anniversary, according to an exclusive report in Billboard magazine. The reunited Dead will perform three massive shows July 3-5 at Chicago's 55,000-capacity Soldier Field, which was the site of the last Grateful Dead show on July 9, 1995. Band leader Jerry Garcia died one month after that show, on Aug. 9, 1995.
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