Full Freeway Closures

There are no full freeway closures planned for this week.

Highway Lane Closures

A single lane in the eastbound direction will be closed between Lone Tree Way/A Street and SR-160 on Tuesday evening from 11:00 pm to 6:00 am.

Ramp Closures

There are no ramp closures planned for this week.

Local Street Closures

A single lane in both directions of Somersville Road/Auto Center Drive will be closed between Century Boulevard and Delta Fair Boulevard on Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm, Monday through Thursday evenings from 10:00 pm to 5:00 am, and Friday evening from 10:00 pm to 6:00 am.

A single lane in both directions of Hillcrest Avenue will be closed between Larkspur Drive/Tregallas Road and Sunset Drive on Monday through Thursday evenings from 9:00 pm to 5:30 am.

Sand Creek Road Interchange/4-Lane Widening Closures

There are no Sand Creek Road Interchange/4-Lane Widening closures planned for this week.

Questions or comments can be directed to the Highway 4 widening hotline at (925) 756-0721 or visit our web site at http://widensr4.org.

Meeting the Challenge: Napa County’s Work Proximity Housing Program - For many people, purchasing that first home is the financial equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. The process is made even more difficult in destination areas such as Napa County where housing prices are high and homes are in demand. It’s not uncommon for a house on the market to receive numerous offers. So, what do you do if you are a first-time homebuyer who wants to live in the community in which you work, yet you have limited resources for a down payment?

If you’re smart, you take advantage of Napa County’s Work Proximity Housing Program, the brainchild of Supervisor Mark Luce.

“Our workers have a hard time competing for housing because they are competing against a world market where people can afford to pay more for these homes,” Supervisor Luce says. “So we went about trying to figure out how we could assist our low and moderate-income workers who work in Napa, live in Napa.”

The proximity program is essentially a new way of looking at affordable housing. “We shifted to a buyer paradigm instead of a property management paradigm. Let’s work with buyers. We found we could specifically qualify low and moderate-income workers and provide them assistance and then allow them to buy any home they wanted in our community,” he explains.

Through the program, Napa County provides a 10 percent silent second mortgage to potential homebuyers. To qualify, prospective homeowners must meet certain specific income standards, work within 15 miles of the intended residence and live in the home. The homebuyer pays the loan back at the time he/she refinances or sells the home; the homebuyer pays no monthly payments, only an appreciation share on the percent of the loan. Read More > at Public CEO

Hell freezes over: Microsoft Office Mobile arrives for iOS - After years of speculation about when it would finally happen, Microsoft is releasing a version of Office for Apple’s iOS today. And it’s free…sort of.

I got a brief peek at the Office suite app running on an iPhone this week, and we will be downloading the app from Apple’s iTunes store as soon as it’s available for a full review. But from my brief preview, it’s clear that this may not exactly be what some Office users were waiting for. That’s because of two very big caveats about Office for iOS: it requires a subscription license of Office through Office 365, and it’s optimized specifically for iPhone (sorry, iPad). The iWork team at Apple can breathe a collective sigh of relief.

But if you’ve already bought into Microsoft’s vision for Office in the cloud and have subscriptions to Office 365 Home Premium, ProPlus, or an Office 365 Enterprise license that includes the Office desktop suite, then the new iPhone app is still a big bonus. It doesn’t take up one of the 5 device license slots that a full copy on a PC does, and it provides most of the functionality of Office Mobile apps on Windows Phone 8. Read More > at ars technica

Is Going to College Still Worth It If You Drop Out? - Welcome the latest chapter of our ongoing epic, Is College Worth It? If you’ve tuned in for previous installments, by now you’ve learned that, for people who graduate with a bachelor’s degree, higher education is overwhelmingly a smart investment. But what about students who drop out? After all, less than 60 percent of Americans actually complete a B.A. within six years of starting. Do they reap a benefit?

Last week, the Hamilton Project at Brookings offered up an answer that might surprise some readers. In short: Yes, a few years of higher ed, even if a student never earns their degree, are better than none.

It’s not just that dropouts earn more than workers who halted their educations after high school or are a bit more likely to have a job (both are true). It’s that, once you factor in all the costs of going to school such as tuition and the years of foregone wages, attending and dropping out is still a profitable choice. Read More > in The Atlantic

Bay Area home prices keep going up, hit 5-year high - Bay Area single family home prices continued a skyward climb in May, reaching their highest level in more than five years, according to a report Thursday.

Median sales prices in the sizzling market were given an upward nudge in the East Bay, Peninsula and South Bay by multiple offers for a scant supply of houses for sale and by a change in the market mix to favor higher-priced homes, said real estate information company DataQuick.

Sales still are well below their year-ago levels, although they rose by double digits from April to May in Alameda, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and 8 percent in Contra Costa County, the San Diego company reported. Read More > in the Oakland Tribune

Bay Bridge contractor in line for bonus if new span opens on time - The contractor building the Bay Bridge’s iconic suspension span will collect a $20 million bonus if it opens to traffic as planned on Sept. 3 — an incentive state lawmakers fear will drive a risky rush to completion.

American Bridge/Fluor Enterprises and the three government agencies overseeing the construction agreed to the incentives in September 2010 as part of a plan to get the long overdue bridge back on track.

The extra cash is small potatoes relative to the $1.43 billion overall contract with the consortium of international mega builders. And the state, not the contractors, will make the final call about when the bridge opens. Read More > in the San Jose Mercury News

Eyeball Licking Causing Pinkeye In Japan - A dangerous fetish has eye experts seeing red and those who practice it seeing pink.

It is eyeball licking — a strange erotic activity wherein participants actually put each other’s tongues on each other’s peepers.

…However, eye experts are worried that this dangerous fad is gaining popularity with preteens, especially after news reports of elementary school students in Japan who dared to test their ocular boundaries and caused multiple cases of pinkeye, otherwise known as conjunctivitis, the Daily Caller reported. Read More > in the Huffington Post

How do you overlook 3,000 datacenters? - While the attention has been focused on the new NSA datacenter in Utah, a re-evaluation, 3 years into the Federal Datacenter closure program, identifies an additional 3,000 facilities that fall under the closure consolidation mandate. Granted, under the loose definition of datacenter that the government is using that could mean 3,000 racks hidden in 3,000 utility closets throughout the country, but how can any organization not know where its data processing and storage facilities actually reside?

As reported in the Federal Times, David Powner, Director of Information Technology Management at the Government Accountability Office, told Congress that a recent estimate of the number of datacenters subject to closure had reached 6,000, which included 3,000 that had not previously been counted. He followed that up by saying that after three years there were still no good, hard numbers on the total number of datacenters in use.

This kind of information really highlights the difference between IT operations in government and private business. While there are stories of occasional servers being misplaced or even walled up in the business world, losing track of entire datacenters, regardless of how small, is something that simply wouldn’t happen in a business environment. With multiple agencies running their own IT and no explicit oversight that gives authority or responsibility to anyone further up the government chain there is rarely anyone with authority who can be held responsible for this poorly organized government IT effort. Read More > at ZDNet

Promoting Home Ownership In California’s Cities – When it comes to home ownership, study after study confirms what civic leaders have know intuitively for a long time: communities prosper when residents own their homes. Recent findings have linked home ownership with increased civic engagement, higher voter turnout, reduced crime rates, better health, and higher educational achievement in children.

A recent survey of those in the market to buy a new home found that, across cultural demographics, the neighborhood surrounding a property is just as important as the house itself. Having healthy neighborhoods attracts buyers and those buyers become the bedrock of the community. This is not just about the American dream, it’s about building cities that can weather hard times.

Unfortunately, the collapse of the housing market in 2007 prompted many individuals to question the value of home ownership. Rampant foreclosures over the past decade have frightened potential buyers. According to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey/Housing Vacancy Survey (CPS/HVS), the homeownership rate nation-wide fell from 69 percent in 2004 to 65.4 percent for 2012 – the largest decline since the Great Depression.

With the many oscillations in the economy over the past years, home sales have fluctuated quite a bit, but we are now seeing the classic signs of a seller’s market: rising home prices, low home inventory, and multiple bids. This trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Read More > at Public CEO

Differing views of the unwritten rules - …Sixth inning: D-backs starter Ian Kennedy hits the Dodgers’ new human highlight machine, Yasiel Puig, with a pitch. In the nose. Not flush in the nose. But enough to bring out the Dodgers’ training staff to administer a concussion test. On the field.

Well, there’s no dispute about what was obviously going to happen next, no matter which edition of that unwritten rule book you favor:

Somebody on the Diamondbacks was about to get plunked.

Even the Diamondbacks expected that. But here’s where their view of these proceedings diverged after that:

In the next half-inning, Dodgers starter Zack Greinke set out to drill Arizona catcher Miguel Montero. And let us repeat: The Diamondbacks expected that.

But …

It took Greinke not one, not two, not three, but four pitches to accomplish that mission, with a 91-mile-per-hour fastball in the back.

So what was the Diamondbacks’ take on that, according to their version of the unwritten rule book?

Violation. Clear violation.

“You get one shot,” Arizona reliever Brad Ziegler told us. “He took four shots. He kept going after him until he hit him. If he takes one shot and hits him, it’s over. But you can’t just keep throwing at him. I’ve heard that since high school.

…The Diamondbacks were incensed that Greinke kept hunting till he hit his target. The Dodgers were enraged that Kennedy went back out and nailed Greinke in the shoulder in the next half-inning, because at that point, according to the Dodgers’ unwritten book, they’d already gotten even — so this case should have been closed. Read More > at ESPN

Bay Bridge: Open new span with or without bolt repairs, experts say - Nothing should stop Caltrans from opening the new Bay Bridge on Sept. 3 as planned, say two of the three internationally renowned bridge and seismic engineering experts commissioned to review its construction.

The remaining punch-list items — including the bolt-by-bolt examination that began in March when three dozen anchor rods snapped on the span — are “minuscule compared to the overall seismic safety of the new bridge,” said Frieder Seible, chairman of the Toll Bridge Seismic Safety Peer Review Panel. “There is no reason to keep traffic off the new bridge until after every last bolt has been 100 percent absolutely checked.”

“There is every reason to believe (the new bridge) will open by Labor. Read More > in the Oakland Tribune

State Department has hired agents with criminal records, memo reveals - The State Department has hired an alarming number of law-enforcement agents with criminal or checkered backgrounds because of a flawed hiring process, a stunning memo obtained by The Post reveals.

The background problems are severe enough that many of the roughly 2,000 agents in State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security can play only limited roles in agency efforts to police bad conduct and prosecute wrongdoers.

The problems in the bureau are the latest revelation in an exploding scandal that also involves accusations that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s security detail and those of the US ambassador to Belgium solicited prostitutes overseas.

A whistleblower charges that State tried to cover up multiple scandals by removing them from an inspector general’s report. Read More > in the New York Post

Anderson: The Problem Is Not Just IRS Lawyers; The Problem Is All Federal Government Lawyers - …The results for the IRS were striking. Of the IRS lawyers who made contributions in the 2012 election, 95% contributed to Obama rather than to Romney. So among IRS lawyers, the ratio of Obama contributors to Romney contributors was not merely 4-to-1 at previously reported, but more like 20-to-1. The ratio of funds to Obama was even more lopsided, with about 32 times as much money going to Obama as to Romney from IRS lawyers.

So has the IRS gone off the rails into hyper-partisanship, leaving behind other more balanced federal agencies? … The data show, however, that the partisanship of the lawyers in the IRS is not unusual or even particularly extreme among federal agencies. In fact, the lawyers in every single federal government agency–from the Department of Education [100%] to the Department of Defense [68%] — contributed overwhelmingly to Obama compared to Romney.

…The political contribution numbers of government lawyers show that the IRS controversy is really a symptom of a larger disease — the rule by career bureaucrat lawyers. Lawyers as a group are not politically representative of the country as a whole, and neither are government employees, so the combination of the two of them creates a dramatic mismatch with the bulk of America. The result of the mismatch is that government agencies lack the political diversity that is necessary to effectively represent the American people. The idea that the Department of Justice, on which we depend for fair and impartial enforcement of the law, is so overwhelmingly tilted to one side should make everyone uneasy regardless of political viewpoint. Whatever the reason for the disparity,the numbers reveal a severely dysfunctional culture in government agencies, one that does not serve the country well. Read More > at TaxProf

Groceries Could Be Amazon’s Next Killer App — If It Can Solve the Math - This week, Amazon announced the expansion of its experiment in grocery delivery to Los Angeles. The bigger news, however, was the unveiling of a new version of the hugely popular Amazon Prime.

While the regular Prime gets you unlimited two-day shipping for $79 per year, Amazon’s Prime Fresh promises unlimited same-day or next-day early morning delivery of more than 500,000 items—including groceries—for $299 annually (minimum order $35).

Amazon has spent years fiddling with grocery delivery in its home city of Seattle. But the Los Angeles rollout and the debut of Prime Fresh is the first signal of Amazon’s intent to try groceries at scale. If Amazon gets groceries right, the implications are far greater than another convenient option for buying your daily bread. Less than two decades after launching, Amazon could change our basic expectations once again about how we shop for everything. Getting just about any everyday product delivered the same day you place the order would shift from novelty to norm. As with the option to order online, the question would change from “Do you have same-day?” to “Why don’t you?”

But the radical nature of such a change also presents a radical challenge. Succeeding at groceries alters everything else because groceries are the toughest delivery problem to solve. Figure out the math on groceries and the ability to deliver nearly anything else on the same day—books, electronics, baby wipes—becomes a given. That’s because the logistics of grocery delivery are uniquely challenging, say supply chain experts. Amazon is rolling out its experiment in groceries slowly because getting them wrong risks a spike in customer mistrust that would undermine the company’s tightly tended reputation for unwavering competence. Read More > at Wired

Must Cats Die So Birds Can Live? - …No one knows exactly how many ferals there are in the United States, but the ASPCA places the population at 70 million nd counting. Cats are extremely fecund: Left to their own devices, two can become 62 in three years. When you have an area with a large population of these cats, they become a nuisance, says Ross, who fields a lot of calls complaining about cats caterwauling, digging through garbage, defecating in gardens and sandboxes and spraying urine. The more informed of them express concerns about diseases such as rabies and toxoplasmosis, which results in neurological problems, including a mental illness associated with cat-hoarding, caused by a parasite in cat feces. What the callers want, Ross says, is for someone to get rid of them, but given the lax laws, he can’t be sure if the animals in question are strays or someone’s pet. Trapping them is too difficult and time-consuming for cash-poor Animal Control departments, and since cats, unlike dogs, don’t present an overt threat to humans, they’re generally allowed to remain on the street, where they continue to multiply.

The population has tripled over the past 40 years. Tripled, says George Fenwick. Wild of eye and George Lucas of hair, Fenwick runs the American Bird Conservancy, an organization he founded back in the early nineties after watching his neighbor’s cat decimate his backyard bird population. While birds are the group’s primary focus, cats are a close second. An early campaign, Cats Indoors!, encouraged cat owners to keep their pets inside, and the animals remain a bête noire. The killer instinct that makes them valuable in controlled circumstances, the Conservancy argues, is a liability on the streets, where increasing numbers of ferals are wiping out other species. For every cat on the street, 200 birds are killed annually, says Fenwick, a font of such information. Sitting in the ABC office above a Chinese restaurant in Washington, he rattles off types at risk: ground-nesters like California least terns, cardinals, house wrens, endangered species like piping plovers. The important thing to remember is that even when they are fed, they still kill, he adds. They kill for fun. Fenwick likens cats, who were introduced to the environment by humans, to invasive species like kudzu in the Northeast or pythons in Florida. It’s an immense ecological problem, he says. Read More > in New York Magazine

Forget Oil – There is a Far More Precious Commodity at Stake – …This new tension stems from a dispute over the most precious commodity in the world today, something far more precious than oil: water.

…This latest crisis involves Egypt and Ethiopia, two of the eleven countries that share the waters of the world’s longest river, the Nile, and very lifeline of Egypt. Without the Nile Egypt would wither up and become a desert, killing all plants, animal and human life along the way.

…Ethiopia has plans to build a hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile which Egypt said would interfere with the flow of the river, and that Egypt would not stand idly and allow this to happen.

In a televised speech Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi stated that “all options” over the Nile dispute with Ethiopia are on the table, a thinly veiled threat that no doubt includes a reference to the use of military force, if it came to that.

Egypt’s President Mohammad Morsi warned Ethiopia that any tampering with the waters of the Nile River would endanger Egypt and that his country would act accordingly and that “all options are open.” Read More > at Oilprice

Dan Walters: Is California’s new budget balanced? Not really - …They define “balanced” as the state’s having enough revenue to pay for the 2013-14 budget’s appropriations. However, their budget ignores some very real obligations that, if recognized, would put the state many billions of dollars in the red.

Moreover, many of the commitments the budget does make – such as a sharp increase in school spending – could bite back later in the decade because they are financed from the temporary sales and income tax increases that voters passed last year.

It’s important to remember both of those points because the politicos are already patting themselves on the back, such as Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez’s self-appraisal, “a tremendous achievement,” or Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg’s claim: “Ho-hum, another on-time, balanced budget. This is the third year in a row.”

The obligations being ignored include the California State Teachers’ Retirement System’s declaration that it needs $4.5 billion more per year to maintain solvency, and more than $50 billion in unfunded liabilities for state retiree health care. Read More > in The Sacramento Bee

A Glamorous Killer Returns - The great migration began perhaps 40 years ago. From strongholds in the Rocky Mountains and Texas, young males headed east, seeking female companionship and new places to settle.

The emigrants were about seven feet long, nose to tail, and weighed up to 160 pounds. Given a dietary choice, they preferred deer, but would eat almost anything that moved: elk, bighorn sheep, wild horses, beaver, even porcupines. Left free for an evening, they were capable of killing a dozen domestic sheep before dawn, eating their fill and leaving the rest for the buzzards. They were also known to attack humans on occasion.

Long ago the Inca called them puma, but today — though they belong to only one species — they have many names. In Arizona they are known as mountain lions; in Florida they are panthers, and elsewhere in the South they are called painters. When they roamed New England, they were called catamounts. In much of the Midwest they are known as cougars, and that is the name everyone understands.

…But today Puma concolor is back on the prowl. That is one of the great success stories in wildlife conservation, but also a source of concern among biologists and other advocates, for their increasing numbers make them harder to manage — and harder for people to tolerate. No reliable estimate exists for the cougar population at its lowest point, before the 1970s, but there are now believed to be more than 30,000 in North America. They have recolonized the Black Hills of South Dakota, the North Dakota Badlands and the Pine Ridge country of northwestern Nebraska. Read More > in The New York Times

BART Top Paid Official Never Worked a Day - In May 2011, the BART General Manager agreed to quit, however she continued to receive regular paychecks for another 19 months at the cost of $333,000 plus benefits. Despite never working a day in 2012 and having no responsibilities at all, she still remained the highest paid official in the system.

Some may say that Dorothy Dugger received a sweetheart deal when she was terminated. Before making her departure official, Dugger quietly arranged to use about 80 weeks of accrued vacation time. While it was available to her for a lump-sum cash-out, she opted instead to use it. By so doing, she was able to continue to receive her benefits for 19 months, including pension contributions, earning 2 extra months of vacation, and boosting her pension by roughly $1,000 per month, for life. The total cost of her accrued benefits after she left work but before she left payroll amounted to $138,000.

The benefits were in addition to the $333,000 salary and $920,000 settlement she received to dispose of a wrongful termination suit. According to Dugger, when the Board decided to fire her, it was in violation of open meeting laws. Read More > at Public CEO

PETA Ranks Best Cities for Vegans - For those who pick veggies over meat, fruit over eggs, and almonds over anything produced by an animal—I’m looking at you, vegans—there are just certain cities that are better than others. Surprisingly, the number one city is located in the state perhaps most famous for its BBQ: Texas.

Ok, ok, it’s Austin. Maybe that’s not such a shock, as the city has been upping its cred with a more hip crowd over the last 10 years or so. Austin just barely topped one of the best cities in America for hipsters, Portland, Oregon. Quite a feat for Austin, as Portland boasts one of what might be the nation’s only all-vegan strip mall.

California breaks into the list at number three with—drum roll please—the City of Los Angeles. PETA, which put the list together, noted that there are plenty of “happy-hour destinations for the vegan professional looking to throw back a beer after a long day.” Southland also hosts an annual Vegan Beer and Food Festival.

…San Francisco, which many might’ve predicted to reign the list, didn’t even make the top 10. Last week was a disappointing one for NorCal hipsters: in addition to being left out of the “Best Vegan Cities” rankings, SF was also “only” ranked third best city for parks. Read More > at California City News

Robots with your face want to invade workplaces and hospitals - Robotic telepresence remains one of those technologies that is always lingering just on the horizon; it’s going to change everything, the futurists say, just as soon as it gets here. But while several clever telerobotics solutions have come to market in recent years (Vgo and Double Robotics for instance), no solution has yet been both sophisticated and user-friendly enough for the mainstream. These robots — designed to give a remote human operator control of a mobile surrogate robot so that, for instance, a company manager in Chicago can virtually tour a factory floor in Topeka — allow users to move around an environment and interact with people and objects on the other side of the city, country, or planet. But for the most part, telerobots remain high-priced toys.

Bedford, Mass.,-based iRobot (IRBT) believes it’s finally changed that. The company — perhaps best known for its adorable, automated floor-sweeping Roomba robots — has a long, established record of understanding its customer, adequately maturing its technologies, and producing the right solution for its end users, whether that user is an immaculately clean apartment-dweller or a Navy explosives ordnance disposal specialist disarming IEDs in Afghanistan. (iRobot builds those robots too.) Earlier this year iRobot quietly rolled out its RP-VITA telemedicine robot in seven North American hospitals (six in the U.S. and one in Mexico City), and how they are received in the hospital environment could spell big things not only for iRobot and its technology partner InTouch Health, but for telerobotics at large.

…Telemedicine isn’t a bad place to start. Modern medicine has sprawled into an often confusing array of specializations — currently there are something like 150 different recognized medical specialties and sub-specialties; at the middle of the last century there were roughly a dozen — and it’s here that telemedicine has found a great deal of room for growth. Santa Barbara, Calif.,-based InTouch Health creates interfaces, apps, and remote presence solutions for the health care industry that are now in more than 700 hospitals, allowing doctors — generally specialists at larger, urban hospitals — to digitally teleconference themselves to a patient’s bedside and converse with both nurses and patients over live audio and video connections. Read More > at CNNMoney

FENNO: NCAA silence on North Carolina academic scandal speaks volumes - These days, the scandals and missteps and outbreaks of forehead-slapping hypocrisy ripping through the upside-down world of college athletics are frequent enough to provide an NCAA-sized headache.

Gordon Gee, the soon-to-be-former Ohio State president, insulted Catholics, the SEC and pretty much everything short of his Mormon faith and beloved Buckeyes during a meeting with the university’s athletic council.

Rutgers managed to not just botch the slam-dunk firing of verbally abusive basketball coach Mike Rice, but make things exponentially worse at each sordid turn, including hiring a new athletic director, Julie Hermann, with her own history of questionable conduct toward athletes.

Miami football player Dyron Dye filed a police report accusing NCAA investigators of coercing him into incriminating the university’s football program, further muddling a circus-like process that would shame Inspector Clouseau. Read More > in the Washington Times

T. Rex at 20: How ‘Jurassic Park’ Science Has Evolved - With a 3D version in the theaters and a sequel due out next year, the now-classic “Jurassic Park” will roar into its 20th anniversary on June 11.

Two decades might seem like the blink of a lizard’s eye on top of 65 million years, but the science and speculations of “Jurassic Park” have evolved significantly since Steven Spielberg’s beasts first shook movie theaters.

Here are seven ways the science of Tyrannosaurus rex and company has changed since audiences first heard, “Welcome to Jurassic Park!”

If filmed today, the science suggests many of “Jurassic Park” dinos would look a bit more Tweety Bird than Terrible Lizard. The first film hewed to the long-standing image of dinosaurs as big, scaly reptiles. Subsequent research, however, has provided more and more evidence that many meat-eating dinosaurs sported plumage. A year ago, scientists in China unearthed a feathered Tyrannosaur — Yutyrannis huali — a slightly smaller relative of T. rex. Velociraptors also clearly had feathers, confirmed by the discovery of quill knobs, a type of feather anchor, on raptor arm bones in 2007. Read More > at Live Science

What to Make of a Warming Plateau - As unlikely as this may sound, we have lucked out in recent years when it comes to global warming.

The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.

The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.

But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean. Read More > in The New York Times

The Education Bubble Has Burst - The student loan debate in Congress is bringing to the forefront the student loan crisis plaguing our nation, as well as the financial instability of academic institutions in the United States.

Relative to the student loan crisis, the New York Federal Reserve concluded in its 2012 report that the obligations for student loans total approximately $1 trillion, or approximately $25,000 per graduate.

The report notes that there are over 15 million borrowers under the age of 30, while the total number of borrowers is almost 39,000,000. The delinquency rates on the loans range between 10% to 20% for the various age categories.

Surprisingly, the report indicates that there are 2.2 million borrowers over the age of 60, with an average balance due of $19,000. The delinquency rate for these borrowers is approximately 12%.

Concurrent with the higher student loan balances, college enrollment rates for students have declined 2.3% in 2013 compared to 2012. This decline is the first downward trend in enrollment in decades.Read More > at the American Thinker

MAKE IT STOP! ‘Facebook – The Musical’ and more

San Francisco Giants Fans Find Diamonds Are a Gull’s Best Friend - Things weren’t looking good in the bottom of the seventh inning at the San Francisco Giants’ home ballpark.

“This will be a bad one,” said usher Chauncey Greer, shaking his head at his post in the right-field promenade.

The score wasn’t the problem: The Giants were skunking the Washington Nationals 6 to 0. Mr. Greer, 47 years old, wasn’t looking down at the diamond, but up. There in the sky were the subjects of his prophecy:

The birds.

About a dozen seagulls had soared out of the darkness, their beady eyes surveying the scene below. They were what ballpark officials call “scouts,” the birds that arrive earliest and appear to gauge how a game is going and how soon fans will leave nacho remains, half-eaten franks and soggy garlic fries.

In the eighth inning, as the Giants racked up another two runs, dozens more gulls had joined the scouts circling overhead. If patterns held, hundreds more birds would invade by the ninth.

The Giants have won two world championships in three years. But they’ve failed to defeat a persistent foe: the team of seagulls at AT&T Park that are thicker than ever this year. Read More > in The Wall Street Journal

California tops list of states with water infrastructure needs - California could use $44.5 billion to fix aging water systems over the next two decades, according to a federal survey that placed the state at the top of a national list of water infrastructure needs.

Texas, at nearly $34 billion, and New York, with about $22 billion, were next in line.

The assessment, conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2011 and released last week, is used to document the capital investment needs of public drinking water systems across the country. The EPA relies on the results to allocate grants through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund.

All told, the survey revealed a $384-billion wish list of infrastructure projects through 2030 — $4.5 billion more than in the 2007 assessment. Read More > in the Los Angeles Times

Waiter and waitress nation: The May payrolls report shows the US creating jobs, just not many good ones - The headline numbers for the May jobs report are about what you would expect for a New Normal economy stuck in 2% growth mode: 175,000 net new jobs last month, the unemployment rate ticking up to 7.6%. No broad signs of acceleration; just the opposite, in fact. As Barclays bank points out, the three-month average increase in nonfarm payrolls through May is now 155,000 vs. a first-quarter average of 207,000. (And at May’s pace of job creation, it would take another 58 months to get back to 5% unemployment.)

In addition, hours worked grew at a 1.9% annualized rate in April and May versus the 3.6% growth seen in the first three months of the year. This downshift reflects a slowing in GDP growth. The bank’s tracking estimate for real GDP growth in the second quarter stands at 1.2%, down from 2.4% in the first quarter.

And what kind of jobs are being created? As economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research points out, job growth was again narrowly concentrated, with the restaurant sector (38,100 jobs), retail trade (27,700) and temporary employment (25,600) accounting for more than half of the job growth in May. Baker: “These are all low-paying sectors. It is worth noting that the job growth reported in these sectors is more an indication of the weakness of the labor market than the type of jobs being generated by the economy. The economy always creates bad jobs, but in a strong labor market workers don’t take them.” Read More > at AEIdeas

How to Keep Your Conversations Private from the NSA – UPDATED - We get it, Joe Citizen. You want your privacy. You want to be able to talk on the internet without everyone and their mother at the InsertAlphabetAgencyHere looking at it. You’re mad about the NSA snooping. You aren’t advocating a violent overthrow of the government. You’re not running a domestic terrorism group (well, there are those new DHS criteria…). You’re not even sending around emails about what a dismal failure President Obama’s administration is (THIS hour, anyway). You just want to be able to chat with friends, conduct your financial business, and argue with your spouse without Big Daddy Gummint all up in your biz. Believe it or not, that’s your right. Harry “Who Cares” Reid may blow it off and say the government’s been “doing that stuff for years,” but we’ve got a news flash for Harry: just because you’ve been doing it a while doesn’t make it any more okay. Ask Ted Bundy…oh, wait.

Victory Girls gets it—partly because we value our privacy too. So, because we are all about free speech here—and private speech, too, now that I think about it—here’s a list of ways you can circumvent the government privacy leeches. Granted, this list isn’t all-inclusive, and let’s face it, I’m not an uber-geek. I do, however, read a lot of uber-geek stuff, and so I’m pretty confident with the list I’m about to show you. Keep in mind that you will need to change some of your habits if you decide you really want to keep your personal stuff private. Most people are too lazy…but if you’re not, here’s the list from the guys over at Wired, as well as a few other nooks and crannies I find things in:

- For internet browsing, use Tor. It comes with a full bundle that you can use on any kind of Windows from XP to 8, Mac, or Linux if that’s your flavor. I won’t bore my political readers with the long explanation of why Tor keeps your internet browsing private, but if you want to read all about it you can check out the Wikipedia entry, or just go to the website.

- For email, use Hushmail. It’s free, it’s secure, and if you’re done using that email, no worries. You can either delete it, or stop signing into it. It’ll be gone in 2 weeks, along with all those fan emails you sent to Justin Bieber. See? You do want privacy. Read More > at Victory Girls

Saturday, June 22, 2013 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Quarry Lakes Regional Recreation Area
2100 Isherwood Way, Fremont, CA 94536
FREE Admission and FREE Parking

Discover your Regional Parks along with health related activities, vendors, and more at this free festival, celebrating National Get Outdoors Day in partnership with the US Forest Service. Enjoy music, entertainment, a Kids’ Zone, naturalist programs, cooking demos, healthy food, and much more.

Entertainment & Activities Schedule

Main Stage & Events hosted by Hispanic Radio & TV personality: Celina Rodriguez

Exhibitors

Healthy Living and Eating
American Heart Association
Asian American Donor Program
Breathe California
Jones Family Chiropractic & Wellness Center
Kraft Foods
Life Chiropractic College West
Milagros de Mexico Drugstores
Physique Wellness
Sekhara Wellness
TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly)
Tri-City Health Center
Washington Township Medical Foundation

Environmental Education and Safety
Alameda County Water District
Alameda County Master Gardeners
Bay Area Ridge Trail Council
Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge
Save Mount Diablo
Sungevity
Union Sanitary District

Recreation Programs and Activities
City of Newark Recreation & Community Services
California Wushu Academy
Dahn Yoga
EBRPD Aquatics Department
EBRPD Fire Department & Smokey Bear
EBRPD Volunteer Trail Safety Patrol
Fremont CERT
Greenfields Fitness Equipment
Kids Zone – USFS Junior Ranger Program
U.S. Forest Service
Mission Peak Fly Anglers
National Park Service – U.S. Dept. of the Interior

Education, Arts and Crafts
East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse
“Get To Know” Youth Art Contest Art Exhibit
Macaroni Kid
On Lok Lifeways

Food Truck Vendors
Frozen Kuhsterd & Pancit Noodles
Kung Fu Tacos

Green Unplugged Film Festival

Launching June 16, 2013

Online Screening check back for links here.

____________________

Frozen Film Festival

Saturday, July 16, 2013

For more information click here.

____________________

San Jose

Thursday, July 25, 2013

CineArts Santana Row

3088 Olsen Drive

San Jose, Ca 95128

7:00pm

Q&A Water Panel following film
Free & Open to the public, donations accepted at the door.

____________________

Aquarium of the Bay

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Pier 39

San Francisco

7:00pm

Tickets available at the door.

For additional screenings visit www.OverTroubledWaters.org   Click on “showtimes”

Resolved, that the Flag of the thirteen United States shall be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the Union be thirteen stars, white on a blue field, representing a new constellation.

June 14, 1777, in Journals of the Continental Congress.

According to American legend, in June 1776, George Washington commissioned Betsy Ross, a Philadelphia seamstress, to create a flag for the new nation in anticipation of a declaration of its independence. However, no one knows with absolute certainty who designed the first stars and stripes or who made it.

A flag of this design was first carried into battle on September 11, 1777, in the Battle of the Brandywine. The American flag was first saluted by foreign naval vessels on February 14, 1778, when the Ranger, bearing the Stars and Stripes and under the command of Captain Paul Jones, arrived in a French port. The flag first flew over a foreign territory in early 1778 at Nassau, Bahama Islands, where Americans captured a British fort.

When two new States were admitted to the Union (Kentucky and Vermont), a resolution was adopted in January of 1794, expanding the flag to 15 stars and 15 stripes. This flag was the official flag of our country from 1795 to 1818.

In 1818, after 5 more states joined the Union, Congress passed legislation fixing the number of stripes at 13 and requiring that the number of stars equal the number of states.

An Executive Order of President Taft dated June 24, 1912 – established proportions of the flag and provided for arrangement of the stars in six horizontal rows of eight each, a single point of each star to be upward.

An Executive Order of President Eisenhower dated January 3, 1959 – provided for the arrangement of the stars in seven rows of seven stars each, staggered horizontally and vertically.

An Executive Order of President Eisenhower dated August 21, 1959 – provided for the arrangement of the stars in nine rows of stars staggered horizon tally and eleven rows of stars staggered vertically.

There have been twenty-seven official versions of the flag so far; stars have been added to it as states have entered the Union. The current version dates to July 4, 1960, when Hawaii became the 50th state.

Both President Wilson, in 1916, and President Coolidge, in 1927, issued proclamations asking for June 14 to be observed as the National Flag Day. But it wasn’t until August 3, 1949, that Congress approved the national observance, and President Harry Truman signed it into law.

Today the flag consists of thirteen horizontal stripes. They are seven red alternating with six white. The stripes represent the original 13 colonies and the stars represent the 50 states of the Union.

The colors of the flag are symbolic as well.

Red symbolizes hardiness and valor, white symbolizes purity and innocence and blue represents vigilance, perseverance and justice.

When the American Revolution broke out, the rebellious colonies did not possess an army in the modern sense. Rather, the revolutionaries fielded an amateur force of colonial troops, cobbled together from various New England militia companies. They had no unified chain of command, and although Artemas Ward of Massachusetts exercised authority by informal agreement, officers from other colonies were not obligated to obey his orders. The American volunteers were led, equipped, armed, paid for, and supported by the colonies from which they were raised.

In the spring of 1775, this “army” was about to confront British troops near Boston, Massachusetts. The revolutionaries had to re-organize their forces quickly if they were to stand a chance against Britain’s seasoned professionals. Recognizing the need to enlist the support of all of the American seaboard colonies, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress appealed to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to assume authority for the New England army. Reportedly, at John Adams’ request, Congress voted to “adopt” the Boston troops on June 14, although there is no written record of this decision. Also on this day, Congress resolved to form a committee “to bring in a draft of rules and regulations for the government of the Army,” and voted $2,000,000 to support the forces around Boston, and those at New York City. Moreover, Congress authorized the formation of ten companies of expert riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, which were directed to march to Boston to support the New England militia.

George Washington received his appointment as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army the next day, and formally took command at Boston on July 3, 1775.

The construction on the western side of the tunnel is nearing completion; the permanent berm and soundwall have been completed. The soundwall is a standard Caltrans soundwall designed to buffer project neighbors from traffic from the Fourth Bore and State Route 24. The process is approximately 25% complete.   

This is the largest temporary soundwall in the State of California, measuring about 30 feet high and 1,000 feet long and very visible from the freeway; it is likely that as motorists see it being dismantled, they may think that the tunnel is ready to open to traffic. They’re closer, but still have the fire and life safety systems installation to complete and test.

The Caldecott Tunnel Fourth Bore may look close to completion, but some of the most complicated work has just begun. Over the coming months, construction crews will install, integrate, and test the extensive systems that will run the tunnel’s fire safety, traffic, and communications functions. These systems are vital to ensuring the safety and efficiency of the tunnel when it opens to traffic in late 2013.

Most of the systems being installed in the Fourth Bore are referred to as Fire-Life-Safety Systems, which is the infrastructure needed to detect and suppress a fire and protect the travelling public. There will be linear heat, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide detectors to monitor fire and air quality. Video Image Detectors (VID) will notify operators in case of an incident inside the tunnel. The tunnel will also be equipped with 19 bi-directional jet fans and 17 Emergency Stations.

Both the Oakland and Moraga-Orinda Fire Departments will respond to tunnel fires. To shut down the tunnel, stop lights outside the tunnel entrances will be turned on. Crosspassages along the tunnel will allow access between Bores 3 and 4 for evacuation (both bores will be shut down if there is an incident in either one). These crosspassages will have closed-circuit televisions and intercoms so operators can monitor and communicate with anyone inside. The passages will also have a ventilation system that will create positive pressure inside, preventing smoke and flames from entering. Seventeen Emergency Stations in niches throughout the tunnel will house fire extinguishers, manual fire alarms, and emergency phones. In the event of a fire, jet fans will be activated along with the ventilation system, and can redirect air flow. Even the tunnel lining was built with special fibers that shield the tunnel from heat and prevent a strong fire from damaging the tunnel structurally.

The Caldecott Fourth Bore is designated as a regional lifeline structure, and is designed to reopen to emergency traffic within 72 hours of a major earthquake. Tunnel systems will help with traffic management. The VID cameras will monitor traffic patterns and alert an operator if there is a slow-down or accident. Variable Message Signs at the portal and within the tunnel will display preprogrammed messages triggered when there is an event. A tunnel radio system will be able to override other radio stations to give emergency messages to motorists.

Summer Blaze is back for another fun‐filled summer! This drop‐in camp is  designed for ages 6 – 11 (proof of age may be required). Camp is held on Monday  – Friday from 11:00 am – 4:00 pm, starting on June 17. Join us for exciting new  games, sports and arts & crafts. Camp calendars are available at City Hall.

Youth CORE Camp is back to give youth an opportunity to complete community  service projects, followed by fun, summer camp activities and field trips. This  camp is designed for youth entering grades 6 – 11 and runs 9:00 am – 4:00 pm  beginning on June 17. Space is limited so early registration is recommended. For  more information, call 625‐7042.

Incrediflix Camp – Two 3‐day camps are offered this summer for children ages 7 –  13. The Green Screen Animation camp will take place July 1 – 3 from 8:00 am –  Noon. Participants will brainstorm ideas, create characters, choose a location, add  voice‐overs and film their movies with a green‐screen backdrop. The SuperheroFilmmaking Camp will take place July 1 – 3 from 12:30 – 4:30pm. Participants will  decide on the characters and the superhero powers that they want to include.  Afterward, students will get to write, act and direct their own super hero
adventure movies.

Lego Summer Camp ‐ Two‐weeklong camps are offered this year. June 17 – 21 for  ages 6 – 10 and June 24 – 29 for ages 7 ‐ 12. Both camps are held from 9:00 am – Noon and space is limited so early registration is recommended. Children will  have an endless supply of Legos to build and participate in extreme challenges, contests, raffle prizes and more. A Shutterfly page will keep parents connected with the excitement.

Tennis Camp – Five‐weeklong camps are offered for ages 4 – 18 at Diamond Hills  Sports Club. The camps run from 9:00 am – 4:00 pm and begin June 10, wrapping  up on July 19. Children will be grouped by age and skill‐level. Students will learn new skills and improve on existing skills, participating in fun drills and competing in inter‐club matches and tournaments. For specific dates and fees, call 625‐7041 or visit tennis camp

Kidz Love Soccer offers classes for children from 2 to 10 years old. These class give
an introduction to the “World’s Most Popular Game,” teaching the basics as well
as age appropriate skills. Classes start on June 24th.

Karate‐ Hosted on Mondays and Wednesdays, participants will learn discipline
and respect for ones self and others in a fun and safe environment. Students will
learn karate movements, skills and techniques. For children and adults ages 4 and
up.

For more information on any of these programs, visit: http://www.oakleyinfo.com or call
625‐7041.

Oakley’s City Council abandoned the proposal to renovate the former Centromart building into an expanded and stand alone Library, which would have necessitated a parcel tax. Instead, the Council approved the bid of Cross Development which plans to expand the existing building to primarily sell groceries as well as other household products in opening a DG Market grocery store.

ACE Hardware store owners, Tony Rogelstadt and Jerry Thorpe, closed escrow this past May, becoming the new landlords to the Oakley Plaza business tenants. ACE Hardware intends to expand and relocate to the Oakley Plaza, becoming the anchor business within the to-be-renovated strip mall. The City Council has already approved the design review for the façade improvements and awaiting the submission of construction plans.

The City, has completed the renovation of the parking lot to the Oakley Plaza to include landscaped medians, additional lighting, 130 new parking spots, and other improvements. Still to be completed is the landscaping within the parking lot, which will be completed soon.

The Downtown Plaza project commenced in May after the demolition of La Costa’s previous home. Goodland Landscape, who was awarded the bid, will construct the Plaza with a fountain centerpiece to stand between the new La Costa restaurant and the vacant retail space which will be home to a bakery, Republic of Cake.

Meanwhile, construction improvements continue along Main Street. The concrete on the north side of the restaurants is primarily complete and the median is installed. Now the focus has shifted to match the south side, closest to City Hall. The complete Main Street upgrade being performed by Bay Cities includes underground utility work, a complete re-work of the curb lines, including “pop outs” at the intersections, wider sidewalks and the installation of a roadway median.

In a statement posted on the City’s Facebook page the City assures the public that “every effort is being made to ensure taxpayers’ dollars are being spent effectively and efficiently in building a quality project that will be the hallmark of the downtown now and in the future, while also emphasizing the safety of Oakley residents and visitors.”

While currently an inconvenience to travel through, residents are thanked for their patience and reminded to look forward to the value added by the completed project when it yields a safe vehicle and pedestrian-friendly route through town, a destination for many events, and increased support of our local Downtown businesses.

Bay Cities, the contractor on site, continues to commit that the full Main Street project will be done by the end of June.

Most heat disorders occur because the person has been overexposed to heat or has over-exercised for his or her age and physical condition. Older adults, young children and those sick or overweight are more likely to succumb to extreme heat,

So, if you are preparing to spend a significant amount of time in heat there are a number of things you can do to prepare for the event.

Drink plenty of water before, during, and after you are active. Fluids such as rehydration drinks, juices, or water help replace lost fluids, especially if you sweat a lot.

Don’t drink liquids that contain alcohol or large amounts of sugar–these actually cause you to lose more body fluid. Also, avoid very cold drinks, because they can cause stomach cramps.

Drink on schedule. Two hours before your activity, drink 24 fl oz (750 mL) of fluid. Drink 16 fl oz (500 mL) of fluid 15 minutes before the event.

Drink rehydration drinks, which are absorbed as quickly as water but also replace sugar, sodium, and other nutrients. Eat fruits and vegetables to replace nutrients.

If you have to stand for any length of time in a hot environment, flex your leg muscles often while standing. This prevents blood from pooling in your lower legs, which can lead to fainting. To prevent swelling (heat edema), wear support hose to stimulate circulation while standing for long periods of time.

Wear lightweight, light-colored, loose-fitting clothing.

Protect yourself from the sun by wearing a wide-brimmed hat (also keeps you cooler) and sunglasses and by putting on sunscreen of SPF 15 or higher (the most effective products say “broad spectrum” or “UVA/UVB protection” on their labels).

NEVER leave anyone in a closed, parked vehicle.

While you are at your event monitor those at high risk. Although anyone at any time can suffer from heat-related illness, some people are at greater risk than others.

§ Infants and young children are sensitive to the effects of high temperatures and rely on others to keep them cool and provide adequate liquids.

§ People 65 years of age or older are less likely to sense and respond to changes in temperature.

§ Overweight people may be prone to heat sickness because of their tendency to retain more body heat.

§ People who are physically ill, especially with heart disease or high blood pressure, or who take certain medications, such as for depression, insomnia or poor circulation, may be affected by extreme heat.

People who have had heatstroke in the past may be more sensitive to the effects of heat in the first few months following the illness, but they do not have long-term problems.

Heat Stroke

Symptoms

• Confusion
• Fainting
• Seizures
• Excessive sweating or red, hot, dry skin
• Very high body temperature
• First Aid
• Call 911

     While waiting for help:

• Place victim in shady, cool area
• Loosen clothing, remove outer clothing
• Fan air on worker; cold packs in armpits
• Wet worker with cool water; apply ice packs, cool compresses, or ice if available
• Provide fluids (preferably water) as soon as possible
• Stay with victim until help arrives

Heat Exhaustion

Symptoms

• Cool, moist skin
• Heavy sweating
• Headache
• Nausea or vomiting
• Dizziness
• Light headedness
• Weakness
• Thirst
• Irritability
• Fast heart beat

First Aid

• Have victim sit or lie down in a cool, shady area
• Give victim plenty of water or other cool beverages to drink
• Cool victim with cold compresses/ice packs
• Take to clinic or emergency room for medical evaluation or treatment if signs or symptoms worsen or do not improve within 60 minutes.
• Do not return to work that day

Heat Cramps

Symptoms

• Muscle spasms
• Pain
• Usually in abdomen, arms, or legs

First Aid

• Have victim rest in shady, cool area
• Worker should drink water or other cool beverages
• Wait a few hours before allowing worker to return to strenuous work
• Have victim seek medical attention if cramps don’t go away

Heat Rash

Symptoms

• Clusters of red bumps on skin
• Often appears on neck, upper chest, folds of skin

First Aid

• Try to victim in a cooler, less humid environment when possible
• Keep the affected area dry

Ben Toasted, the Almond Festival mascot

This is from an email I received today from the Oakley Chamber of Commerce regarding the Almond Festival:

Many people have been asking recently about the Oakley Almond Festival. Because the Chamber of Commerce was one of the main sponsors we would like to update the residents of Oakley on the status. Sadly, we will not be holding the Almond Festival this year.

The Almond Fest in its familiar form came to an end because it was no longer possible to get the carnival, and the rides were the biggest attraction. The carnival pulled out of the 2011 Almond Fest at the last minute, leaving the Chamber in an awkward financial position and the citizens with a disappointing event.

There’s also been some debate as to whether “Almond Fest” represents who we are as a city and a chamber. Older residents feel nostalgia for the almonds; newer residents may never have seen an almond tree in Oakley. The primary crop grown in Oakley for the past several decades has been grapes; hence the new “Water and Wine” theme the City is pursuing. Yet, with only one small winery actually located in Oakley, we’re not ready for a full-scale wine festival.

The City of Oakley will be holding its new Heart of Oakley Festival downtown on Main Street on September 14th, 2013–approximately the time of year at which the Almond Fest normally took place. The Chamber of Commerce is one of the sponsors of the Heart of Oakley Festival and will be providing the Beer and Wine Garden, offering wines made from Oakley grapes.

This should not be taken to mean that the Heart of Oakley Festival is a replacement for the Almond Festival. Heart of Oakley is essentially a City event. Admission is free and revenue from booth rentals goes to the City.

We’d love to hear your suggestions for an event to replace the Almond Fest—one that would attract locals, out-of-town visitors, and vendors. Please contact me at president@oakleychamber.com.

With Appreciation,
Sallie Goetsch
Chamber President
president@oakleychamber.com

Full Freeway Closures

EASTBOUND:
There are no full freeway closures planned for this week.

WESTBOUND:
There are no full freeway closures planned for this week.

Highway Lane Closures

A single lane in the eastbound direction will be closed between Contra Loma Boulevard/L Street and Lone Tree Way/A Street on Monday through Thursday evenings from 11:00 pm to 6:00 am, and on Friday evening from 11:59 pm to 6:00 am.

A single lane in the westbound direction will be closed between Lone Tree Way/A Street and Contra Loma Boulevard/L Street on Monday through Thursday evenings from 9:00 pm to 4:00 am.

Ramp Closures

There are no ramp closures planned for this week.

Local Street Closures

A single lane in both directions of Somersville Road/Auto Center Drive will be closed between Century Boulevard and Delta Fair Boulevard on Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm.

Sand Creek Road Interchange/4-Lane Widening Closures

There are no Sand Creek Road Interchange/4-Lane Widening closures planned for this week.

Questions or comments can be directed to the Highway 4 widening hotline at (925) 756-0721 or visit our web site at http://widensr4.org.

The 21st Century Video Platform Apple Should Build - …Forget the past, build the future.

For your Apple TV device, do just enough with your hardware and software to make the existing cable & satellite experience a little bit better. But don’t get too caught up on the world as we know it. Don’t build anything that requires the permission of the cable & satellite guys, or the cable networks.

Instead, put most of your focus on building a video delivery system for 21st century, and devices made to work seamlessly with that delivery system. The iPad is one of those, and an important one. But you need to help people build new over-the-top video services that reach the TV, too.

So create, as Apple can, the ideal Internet video platform for the 21st century. Where all programming can be delivered over ip to multiple devices — iPads, iPhones, Macbooks and the Apple TV— via IP instead of cable. Read More > at Medium

It Won’t Be Easy, But Here’s How You Can Keep All Your Conversations Private - Your private conversations aren’t that private. In fact, the government is tapped into the servers of the top technology companies.

The NSA was granted carte blanche to the metadata of millions of Verizon phone calls. Current laws allow cops to access your email without a warrant if that email is stored in the cloud at least six months. Someone, somewhere could potentially be listening or reading your conversations. You can fight it, but it’s not easy.

If you’re not concerned about the government, hackers are out there ready to dox (display all your personal information online) you if they deem you important enough or for the fun of it. So how do you communicate without the whole world finding out that you’ve visited the doctor 12 times in the past six months for a mysterious rash? Well it’s not easy, but there are ways to keep your correspondence off the grid.

Clearly you can’t use your own phone, given that the government already is compiling metadata on who you call and how often. To limit the chance of being spied upon while making calls on the go you need to invest in a “burner” phone (so named because such phones are used for a brief period of time, then tossed away like stale pizza). Read More > at Wired

Retiree benefits and ObamaCare collide: Column - …We already know that many state and local governments are in a financial hole that keeps getting deeper. A newly released report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) makes clear that, absent significant reforms, the fiscal picture for most state and local governments will steadily worsen through 2060. A main cause, in addition to Medicaid, is the cost of health care for state and local government retirees. These largely unfunded obligations are similar to the pressures on the federal government to fulfill its unrealistic Medicare promises.

But there is a critical difference when it comes to how state and local governments can approach these obligations compared to the federal government. State and local governments can’t print money and typically have “balanced budget” requirements. More often than not, retiree health benefits are not guaranteed under state constitutions, are not insured, and are not protected by federal law, which means the systems in place can be changed.

States that offer extremely generous health benefits for government retirees, and which have little to no pre-funding for those benefits, could choose to move their retirees into the Affordable Care Act’s new exchanges. State and local governments would likely continue to contribute by paying some premium support to individual retirees for healthcare, but the federal government and/or participants in the exchanges would pick up much of the tab. For these states, the exchanges offer a chance to shore up their finances and relieve state taxpayers of some of the looming burden of financing all those retirees. It could be a huge opportunity for states and localities in desperate need of fixing their long-term finances, and one that they should seriously consider in the coming months. Read More > in USA Today

Documents: U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program - The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

…The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Dropbox , the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”

Government officials declined to comment for this article. Read More > in the Washington Post

Modesto Offers Incentives to New Businesses - What’s the best way for a city to attract business? Fancy social media campaigns? Star-studded media efforts? Promises of specialized downtown events?

What about offering plain old cash?

The City of Modesto is considering the latter in its latest effort to encourage businesses to open in their downtown district. The idea is a collaborative effort between the City, Chamber of Commerce, and Downtown Improvement District. With a 16% vacancy rate, they decided to get creative.

In Modesto, if all goes to plan, a company that brings in zero to five jobs would receive $1,000; a company that brings in five to ten gets $2,000; and all others get $2,500. Read More > at California City News

Remember All Those Passwords? No Need – …So most people use the same password over and over again, and live with the guilt.

There are solutions. Most Mac and Windows Web browsers now offer to memorize passwords for you. But that feature doesn’t work on all Web sites, and is generally of little help when you pick up your phone or tablet. At that point, the only person you’ve locked out of all your online accounts is you.

The only decent solution is to install a dedicated password memorization program (like Roboform, KeyPass, LastPass, 1Password, and so on). Last week, one of the best was just improved: Dashlane, now at 2.0. It’s attractive, effective, loaded with timesaving features and available for Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android — and it’s free. Read More > in The New York Times

What Still Irks the NFL Fan - …Revenues and TV viewership keeps going higher so the commissioner and the league are doing a lot of things right from a business standpoint. However, there are still several areas that still irk fans that I have spoken to.

1) Charging fans full price for pre-season games: Anyone who’s ever been a season ticket holder knows that this is one of the biggest rip offs in all of sports. The pre-season product doesn’t match up to the regular season product and there should be an adjustment made. There’s really not a lot fans can do about this but something should be done. And it’s not getting rid of two games in trade for an 18 game season. I’d like to see one pre-season game limited to only rookies and players with less than three years experience.

2) Obnoxious fan behavior: Being an agent I get to visit a lot of stadiums and I will admit fan behavior has improved somewhat over the last two decades but it still has a way to go. Inebriated fans that project their alcohol induced aggressive antics toward opposing fans or their neighbors must be weeded out. There is no way that a father or mother should be intimidated to take their 8-year son or daughter to a game.

3) Limited access to games on TV/Blackouts: In the efforts to turn the NFL Network, well, into a serious network, the league is hammering square pegs in round holes to make this work at the expense of the fan, not just other networks. If you don’t have DirecTV or the NFL Network, an a la carte system for watching the game you want is still elusive. However, it looks like this could be changing soon, unless of course the NFL wants you to pay a premium for the NFLN. I think most fans, especially displaced fans will pay for an a la carte game, but let’s make it simple to do without them having to drill holes in the roof for a satellite dish or sit in a sports bar that serves crappy food. Read More > at the National Football Post

Why Does Acne Still Exist? - Treating acne is a $3 billion industry in the United States alone. That may be why there’s not enormous incentive to develop a vaccine. Like the rest of medicine, though, the approach to acne is now becoming more individualized — taking into consideration differences in the way different people respond to the disease.

Some acne 101: You may already know that acne is linked to the bacterium Propionibacterium acnes, which nestles in the dark, oily, oxygen-deprived crannies of our pores. Acne is also linked to inflammation, overgrowth of the upper skin layer, excess sebum, and depression. Because the root of the problem has long seemed to be a bacterium, antibiotics have been the go-to treatment. Dermatologists are also working on developing something called “antimicrobial peptides” to kill the bacteria — anticipating the day that the bacteria outgrow our current antibiotics, and they fail us.

Still, as millions of people who have used antibiotics in failed attempts know, killing the bacteria doesn’t work for everyone. A study earlier this year found that severity of acne does not necessarily correlate with the amount of P. acnes on the skin. It also turns out there are different strains of the bacterium, some of which may cause the more severe cases. It might be too early to say that there are distinct “good” and “bad” strains of the acne bacteria, but it does appear that killing all of them might not be the best plan. Read More > in The Atlantic

Despite more people and more cars, California’s smog is in retreat - Despite a three-fold increase in people and cars in the last 50 years, California’s strict vehicle emissions standards have managed to significantly clear the state’s air, according to new research.

The study also found that Southern California’s air chemistry has changed for the better. The amount of organic nitrates in the atmosphere — which cause smog’s eye-stinging irritation — has drastically fallen off, according to federal researchers.

Ozone and other pollutants have been monitored in the state since the 1960s. Since then the population in Southern California has tripled, as has the number of cars on the road. Nevertheless, tailpipe emissions have decreased. Read More > in the Los Angeles Times

State employees rally for better contract - Service Employees International Union Local 1000, the state’s largest public employee union, started collective bargaining with the state of California in April on behalf of 95,000 workers.

The state negotiating team wants a “cost neutral” contract, the union says, while state employees are seeking a raise and workplace improvements after years of furloughs and cutbacks.

…Local 1000 wants:
An across-the-board pay increase for all SEIU-represented state workers
No new furloughs or personal leave programs for the term of the new contract
New rules against workplace bullying and abuse by managers. Read More > in the Sacramento Business Journal

Verizon providing all call records to U.S. under court order - The National Security Agency appears to be collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of American customers of Verizon, one of the nation’s largest phone companies, under a top-secret court order issued in April.

The order appears to require a Verizon subsidiary to provide the NSA with daily information on all telephone calls by its customers within the United States and from foreign locations into the United States.

The order, which was signed by a judge from the secret court that oversees domestic surveillance, was first reported on the Web site of the Guardian newspaper. The Web site reproduced a copy of the order, which two former U.S. officials told The Washington Post appears to be authentic.

A senior Obama administration official said Thursday that the purported order “does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls” but relates only to “metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of a call.” The official said such information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States.” Read More > in the Washington Post

MLB seeks to suspend A-Rod, Braun - Major League Baseball will seek to suspend about 20 players connected to the Miami-area clinic at the heart of an ongoing performance-enhancing drug scandal, including Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun, possibly within the next few weeks, “Outside the Lines” has learned. If the suspensions are upheld, the performance-enhancing drug scandal would be the largest in American sports history.

…Corroborating evidence against some players could prove difficult to come by. Several sources told ESPN that Bosch dealt only in cash and usually used friends as couriers, sometimes never seeing some of the athletes he served.

…The players who might ultimately face discipline from MLB include: Rodriguez, Braun, Cabrera, Colon, Grandal, Nelson Cruz, Francisco Cervelli, Jesus Montero, Jhonny Peralta, Cesar Puello, Fernando Martinez, Everth Cabrera, Fautino de los Santos, Jordan Norberto and a number of other players who either are identified by code names or whose names appear in other documents not obtained by “Outside the Lines.” Read More > at ESPN

California farmers struggle to keep up with demand for rabbit meat - …Demand for rabbit meat is so high right now that farmers like Mark Pasternak of Devil’s Gulch Ranch in Northern California have trouble keeping up. Pasternak’s farm supplies the meat to farmers markets and high-end restaurants like The French Laundry and Chez Panisse.

Rabbit has been popular in Europe, China and other parts of the world for years, but for some reason it hasn’t yet found mainstream appeal in the United States. Pasternak says his theory for this sudden popularity is that European chefs or those who have trained in Europe are putting rabbit on their menus.

“A European chef gets over here and the first thing he says is, ‘Where’s the rabbit?’” said Pasternak. “It’s their staple over there; that’s one of their go-to meats. It’s very versatile and a really good meat.”

Rabbit meat is lean, high in omega-3 oils, easy to harvest and relatively free of disease. The alfalfa-eating animals are kept in cages with grated bottoms, preventing them from coming into direct contact with their droppings. Rabbits also have a lower impact on the environment than chickens or cows, and less prone to waste. Read More > at KPCC

Treasury, UAW health care trust will sell 50 million shares of GM stock - …The Treasury sold nearly 20 percent of its remaining shares in General Motors Co. in the first three months of the year, the Detroit automaker disclosed Thursday.

The Treasury, which initially held 60.8 percent of GM as part of the U.S. $49.5 billion bailout, now owns just 16.4 percent, or 241.7 million shares. In December, the Treasury sold GM 200 million shares of its stake for $5.5 billion to reduce its stake to 300 million shares.

In total, Treasury has recouped $30.6 billion. At current trading prices, Treasury would lose around $10 billion on its GM bailout. Read More >in the Detroit News

Amazon to start delivering groceries in 40 U.S. cities amid fears it’ll destroy local supermarkets - Amazon is planning a major roll-out of an online grocery business that it has been quietly developing for years.

The online retailer has been delivering food to locals in Seattle, Washington- where the internet giant’s headquarters are based- but they announced on Tuesday that they plan to expand the operation to include many more U.S. markets.

It will clearly be a cause for concern in the food industry as brick-and-mortar grocery stores will see their markets threatened by the familiar online store.

…The company has been testing AmazonFresh in its hometown of Seattle for at least five years, delivering fresh produce such as eggs, strawberries and meat with its own fleet of trucks.

Amazon is now planning to expand its grocery business outside Seattle for the first time, starting with Los Angeles as early as this week and the San Francisco Bay Area later this year.

If those new locations go well, the company may launch AmazonFresh in 20 other urban areas in 2014, including some outside the United States, said one of the people. Read More > in the Daily Mail

UCLA Anderson Forecast paints dismal picture of economic recovery - The country’s tepid growth in its gross domestic product isn’t creating enough good jobs to build a strong middle class, according to a UCLA report released Wednesday.

“Growth in GDP has been positive, but not exceptional,” UCLA economists wrote in their quarterly Anderson Forecast. “Jobs are growing, but not rapidly enough to create good jobs for all.”

The report, which analyzed long-term trends of past recoveries, found that the long-anticipated “Great Recovery” has not yet materialized.

Real GDP growth — the value of goods and services produced after adjusting for inflation — is 15.4% below the 3% growth trend of past recoveries, wrote Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast. More robust growth will be necessary to bring this recovery in line with previous ones.

…Despite the less-than-rosy outlook for the U.S., California’s economic picture is brighter in large part because of demand for California goods, such as computers and other technology, UCLA economists said.

The Golden State outperformed the U.S. in the rate of payroll jobs growth in the 12-month period that ended in April 2013. Only Utah has added jobs faster than California. Read More > in the Los Angeles Times

OPEC Sweats: How Low Can Oil Prices Go? – …The other option is for OPEC members to jointly curtail production to counteract the recent influx of US oil. In theory, this would inflate prices and keep many petro-states on the right side of that black dotted line. But there are divisions within OPEC. Some members are being hit harder than others based on the type of oil they have, and generally the countries most affected by the new US supply are also the least able to curtail their own supply without gutting their economy.

Of course, the price of oil is volatile and subject to more than just supply. There’s also no guarantee that the price will continue to go down. But every country on that list is watching the US shale revolution closely and sweating as the dotted line drops further. Read More > at The American Interest

Dwight Freeney is wrong if he thinks owners are colluding against veterans - Dwight Freeney is flat-out wrong.

Jim Irsay, Robert Kraft, Arthur Blank and the other 29 NFL owners weren’t colluding against Freeney. They weren’t colluding against Charles Woodson, John Abraham, Osi Umenyiora, Michael Turner, Richard Seymour or any of the other 30-somethings who, like Freeney, hit the free-agent market in March and sat, and sat, and sat waiting for an opportunity to play elsewhere.

Collusion is a convenient cry, but it is too late for that, for Freeney or for any other veteran who in 2011 agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement with the National Football League that now is proving to have been a bigger win for the owners than the players.

Collusion? Try delusion.

It’s not that the owners aren’t capable of collusion. They came dangerously close a few years ago during the uncapped year, when the league allegedly implemented an understood cap that Washington, Dallas, New Orleans and Oakland ignored. But the owners didn’t collude in this instance, and even Freeney admitted he has no evidence that they did.

This just in: The economics of the NFL have changed. The system has changed. The practice rules have changed. The result is veterans by and large no longer can cash in one last time before hanging up their helmets for good. The days of the three-year, $16 million contract for a player in his mid-30s are gone. Read More > at ESPN

How you and I could become nodes in the internet of things - …The concept of wireless body area networks (WBANs) isn’t a new one. WBANs could be used to sever the cord between patients and their monitoring equipment. Companies like Apple and Heapslylon are exploring the possibility of connected clothes with embedded sensors. We’ve already begun embracing a new era of wearables, such as Google Glass to Fitbit (see disclosure), designed to become extensions of our senses and movements.

All of these devices will become key end-points in the internet of things, but what Cormoran proposes to make them pull double duty. Rather than just remain terminuses, they could route bits to and relay data from each other, becoming a distributed ad hoc network that constantly morphs as we move through physical space. Read More > at GIGaom

Behind the Rise in House Prices, Wall Street Buyers - The last time the housing market was this hot in Phoenix and Las Vegas, the buyers pushing up prices were mostly small time. Nowadays, they are big time — Wall Street big.

Large investment firms have spent billions of dollars over the last year buying homes in some of the nation’s most depressed markets. The influx has been so great, and the resulting price gains so big, that ordinary buyers are feeling squeezed out. Some are already wondering if prices will slump anew if the big money stops flowing.

…While these investors have not touched many healthy real estate markets, they are among the biggest buyers in struggling areas of the country where housing prices have been increasing the fastest. Those gains, in turn, have been at the leading edge of rising home prices nationwide.

Some see the emergence of Wall Street buyers as a market-driven answer to the nation’s housing ills. Investment companies are buying up rundown homes at a time when ordinary people can’t or won’t.

Nationwide, 68 percent of the damaged homes sold in April went to investors, and only 19 percent to first-time home buyers, according to Campbell HousingPulse. That is helping to shore up prices and create confidence in the broader markets. Read More > in The New York Times

Crime up in Oakland, much of Bay Area - With nearly 12 robberies a day and murders, rapes and assaults all on the rise, Oakland is the Bay Area’s crime hot spot – but new FBI statistics show that the city is far from alone in confronting rising mayhem.

Eleven of the Bay Area’s 15 largest cities recorded higher levels of violent crime in 2012 than the year before, according to preliminary totals that the FBI released Monday. The figures represent an abrupt turnaround from a year ago, when data showed that crime had dropped significantly compared with 2010.

The new data confirmed that all types of violent crime – murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assaults – increased in Oakland in 2012, as did property crime such as burglaries and thefts. The statistics show that Oakland has the highest per-capita crime rate in California.

It’s a trend that has rolled into 2013. Over the weekend and early Monday, 17 people were shot in incidents ranging from a sideshow – an illegal car rally – to a triple shooting outside a downtown nightclub. Among the victims was a 17-year-old boy, David Manson Jr., who was shot in the middle of the day Sunday on an East Oakland street. Read More > in the San Francisco Chronicle

California lawmakers vote to exclude public from some meetings - Lawmakers on Monday voted to allow the public to be excluded from certain gatherings that include the governor and county officials.

The state Senate sent to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk a measure created in reaction to a legal opinion by a county prosecutor. The official said a private 2011 meeting between Brown and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors violated the public’s right to see government business being conducted.

…He noted that California’s open-meetings law, the Ralph M. Brown Act, already allows the state attorney general, county district attorneys, security consultants and others to hold closed sessions with local government boards on public security matters.

If the governor signs the legislation, it will mean “he knew … the meeting was illegal” when he spoke behind closed doors with the supervisors in 2011, said Terry Francke, general counsel for the open-government advocacy group Californians Aware.

…”This is how they correct violations of the Brown Act when they’re caught in the act: They change the law so it will give them cover in the future.” Read More > in the Los Angeles Times

Cities crack down on medical marijuana shops as court decision, ballot measures embolden new bans - What could be considered the greatest fear of responsible use advocates is being realized after the State Supreme Court affirmed the power of local governments to regulate and ban medicinal marijuana dispensaries. Throughout Southern California, local governments are acting to shutter the storefronts that have been operating within the gray areas of local laws.

The Supreme Court’s decision opened the door for more proactive eradication efforts by local governments, who have used the police to forcibly close pot shop after pot shop. Advocates say that this leaves patients without access to their prescribed drugs, but authorities say they are ridding their cities of illegal, nuisance businesses. Read MOre > at Public CEO

Do college coaches have too much power? – The first documented incident of Mike Rice abusing basketball players at Rutgers happened soon after he was hired, in 2010. That same year, Greg Winslow, the head swimming coach at the University of Utah, taped a PVC pipe to the back of one of his athletes and ordered him to swim underwater, which he did – until he passed out. In both cases, no whistles were blown on the alleged abuse until this year.

Why did it take so long? Simple: student-athletes feel powerless to speak up.

That has to change.

If a college degree is the key to the future, and a scholarship is the only way to pay for that degree, then it’s no wonder student-athletes are hesitant to call out the person who holds the power of issuing scholarships – the coach. So when faced with a choice between reporting an abusive coach or turning the other cheek, the decision is clear: shut up and deal

…This is why there should be a separation of power. Take the power of scholarship renewal away from the head coach. Take it out of the athletic department altogether. Make it based on academic performance (and staying out of trouble), rather than something determined by a man or woman who is paid to win games.

That’s unlikely ever to happen, however. The SEC distributed nearly $300 million to its member schools last year alone – nearly triple the contribution of just a decade ago. Money talks, and in the case of college sports it accentuates an athletic department’s importance to a university and why it should maintain as much power (if not more) as it already wields. Read More > at Yahoo! Sports

Monterey Shale: California’s Trillion-Dollar Energy Source -

Yahoo eliminates classic Mail, requiring users to agree to Gmail-like email scanning - From Monday June 3rd, Yahoo’s “classic” Mail interface is no more. Yahoo unveiled a redesign of its webmail interface late last year, but has until now allowed users to use the old version. Anyone that hasn’t signed up for to the new experience will be prompted to upgrade or give up on Yahoo Maill altogether. To upgrade, you’ll have to agree to a new terms of service agreement that grants Yahoo the permission to “scan and analyze all incoming and outgoing communications content sent and received from your account.” The company notes that it collects and stores some data to “provide personally relevant product features and content, to match and serve targeted advertising and for spam and malware detection and abuse protection.”

In exchange for giving Yahoo these extended permissions, you’ll get a cleaner interface that better matches the company’s mobile apps and improved navigation features. Yahoo’s decision to scan and analyze its users’ emails has ruffled a few feathers, but it’s worth noting that the company’s automated scanning policy seems to be virtually identical to the way Google targets ads in Gmail. Read More > at The Verge

Surprise Manufacturing Downturn Holds Back U.S. Growth: Economy - Manufacturing (NAPMPMI) in the U.S. unexpectedly shrank in May at the fastest pace in four years, showing slowdowns in business and government spending are holding back the world’s largest economy.

The Institute for Supply Management’s factory index fell to 49, the lowest reading since June 2009, from the prior month’s 50.7, the Tempe, Arizona-based group’s report showed today. Fifty is the dividing line between growth and contraction. The median forecast of 81 economists surveyed by Bloomberg was 51.

Across-the-board federal budget cuts and overseas markets that are struggling to rebound will probably continue to curb manufacturing, which accounts for about 12 percent of the economy. At the same time, demand for automobiles, gains in residential construction and lean inventories may spark a pickup in orders and production in the second half of the year. Read More > in Bloomberg

Behind the tragedy of Detroit - Detroit, once one of the nation’s most vibrant cities, faces imminent bankruptcy. That’s the headline from last month’s report of emergency fiscal manager Kevyn Orr, issued 45 days after he was appointed by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to take over the city’s government.

“The path Detroit has followed for more than 40 years is unsustainable,” Orr said, “and only a complete restructuring of the city’s finances and operations will allow Detroit to regain its footing and return to a path of prosperity.”

The police department, his report says, “is in disarray.” Nearly one-quarter of fire department operations could be “largely inoperational” on any given day. The city-owned electric grid “has been a disaster,” and the city’s water system, which serves a region with 4 million people, “has a history of dysfunction.” The city’s 78,000 vacant structures and 60,000 vacant land parcels “present an ongoing public safety and public health concern.”

It’s a tragic situation that could be regarded as just the fault of corrupt public officials. The most recent former mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, has gone to prison. So has former City Council President Pro Tem Monica Conyers, the wife of 48-year Rep. John Conyers.

But Detroit’s problems are more fundamental. Detroit is an extreme case, but similar problems afflict many of our central cities. Read More > in the New York Post

Pressure Grows to Create Drugs for ‘Superbugs’ - …The need for new antibiotics is so urgent, supporters of an overhaul say, that lengthy studies involving hundreds or thousands of patients should be waived in favor of directly testing such drugs in very sick patients. Influential lawmakers have said they are prepared to support legislation that allows for faster testing.

The Health and Human Services Department last month announced an agreement under which it will pay $40 million to a major drug maker, GlaxoSmithKline, to help it develop medications to combat antibiotic resistance and biological agents that terrorists might use. Under the plan, the federal government could give the drug company as much as $200 million over the next five years.

…Under a plan proposed by a professional medical group, the Infectious Disease Society of America, new antibiotics approved through quicker testing would carry a special label specifying that their use be limited to very sick patients.

But critics of the plan argue that merely putting a restrictive label on a medicine is not enough, and that limited tests might not be adequate to determine a drug’s safety and effectiveness. They say they worry that the new medications, without the more comprehensive testing, could then be used on healthier patients who do not necessarily need them. Read More > in The New York Times

Also… don’t forget to save the date for the Annual Cityhood Celebration held on Saturday, July 6, 2013 at the Freedom Basin. The festivities will begin at 6:00 pm and will culminate in a firework extravaganza. This evening will include jumpies, food, games and music. Be sure to bring your lawn chairs and blankets to enjoy the fun. Admission to the event is free, wristbands for children’s activities are $5.

Concentrations of ground-level ozone pollution are forecast to be unhealthy tomorrow.

Residents are encouraged to drive less and reduce their energy use tomorrow and every day so pollution levels are lower, preventing health alerts when temperatures are high.

To help prevent smog this summer, please:
- Bike to work or around town
- Take public transit
- Telecommute
- Carpool and link your errands to reduce driving
- Avoid using gas-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers
- Reduce household energy use
- Don’t use lighter fluid on the barbecue
- Avoid using aerosol spray cleaners, paints and hairspray

High levels of ozone pollution are particularly harmful for young children, seniors and those with respiratory and heart conditions. Vigorous outdoor exercise should be undertaken only in the early morning hours when ozone concentrations are lower.

To plan your commute online, visit 511.org.

To monitor current air quality conditions, visit sparetheair.org

Download the FREE Spare the Air iPhone or Android application at sparetheair.org for alert notifications, local air quality forecasts, podcasts and several tools to help reduce air pollution!

This AirAlert is provided by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Thank you for doing your part to Spare the Air!

This AirAlert is provided by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Thank you for doing your part to Spare the Air!

Do not reply directly to this email. If you want more information on the air quality forecast, or other aspects of the local air quality program, please contact your local air quality agency using the information above. For more information on the U.S. EPA’s AIRNow Program, visit http://www.airnow.gov.

To Our Customers:

Raley’s Family of Fine Stores has recently discovered that a portion of our computer network systems may have been the target of a complex, criminal cyber attack.

We immediately initiated an investigation to determine whether cyber criminals may have obtained customer credit and debit card information. At this time, we have not confirmed any unauthorized access to payment card data, but our investigation remains ongoing. We have no reason to believe that debit PIN numbers could have been accessed. We do not collect Social Security or drivers’ license numbers in association with payment card transactions.

Raley’s has taken a series of immediate steps to enhance the security measures already in place to protect customer data. We are confident that our customers can continue using their payment cards in its stores.

We sincerely regret any inconvenience this incident may have caused and wanted to reach out to our customers to encourage you to:

• Check and monitor your bank and credit card statements for evidence of unauthorized transactions.
• Contact your bank or credit card company if you identify suspicious charges.
• Cardholders are not typically held responsible for fraudulent charges made by unauthorized parties if reported promptly to the card issuer.

You can contact our dedicated response team from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day:
Phone: 800-925-9989

Visit our website, www.raleys.com, for updates and to see our customer fact sheet.

You can also learn more about fraud from the California Office of Privacy Protection website and the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Information website.

Concentrations of ground-level ozone pollution are forecast to be unhealthy tomorrow.

Residents are encouraged to drive less and reduce their energy use tomorrow and every day so pollution levels are lower, preventing health alerts when temperatures are high.

To help prevent smog this summer, please:
- Bike to work or around town
- Take public transit
- Telecommute
- Carpool and link your errands to reduce driving
- Avoid using gas-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers
- Reduce household energy use
- Don’t use lighter fluid on the barbecue
- Avoid using aerosol spray cleaners, paints and hairspray

High levels of ozone pollution are particularly harmful for young children, seniors and those with respiratory and heart conditions. Vigorous outdoor exercise should be undertaken only in the early morning hours when ozone concentrations are lower.

To plan your commute online, visit 511.org.

To monitor current air quality conditions, visit sparetheair.org

Download the FREE Spare the Air iPhone or Android application at sparetheair.org for alert notifications, local air quality forecasts, podcasts and several tools to help reduce air pollution!

This AirAlert is provided by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Thank you for doing your part to Spare the Air!

This AirAlert is provided by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Thank you for doing your part to Spare the Air!

Do not reply directly to this email. If you want more information on the air quality forecast, or other aspects of the local air quality program, please contact your local air quality agency using the information above. For more information on the U.S. EPA’s AIRNow Program, visit http://www.airnow.gov.

Instead, our small business-like approach of employing a small, engaged Staff contributed to our ability to weather the storm. Changes such as some reductions in staff, adjustments to contracted services and the restructuring of staffing operations (many staff wearing multiple hats) poised us to make it through. We have maintained a balanced budget and a healthy reserve in every year since incorporation.

The City has two major sources of revenues; property taxes and sales taxes. These two sources have been on the rise and are projected to continue to rise.

As reported in the January 30 online edition of The Wall Street Journal home prices in Oakley are up 23.7% over the last year – one of the higher growth rates in the Bay Area. Of the 107 cities in the Bay Area, Oakley places 21st on the big bounce list. In Contra Costa County only Richmond placed higher on the list.

Beginning March 20, 2009 all employees, except certain Police Department and limited service employees, were mandatorily furloughed from work on an unpaid basis the third Friday of every month. Vacation, sick, or administrative leave, or floating holiday or compensatory time may not be used by the employees.

A year-end furlough was also implemented. During the Year-End furlough employees could utilize vacation leave, administrative leave, floating holiday hours or compensatory time, if available, and effectively be paid for the regular work days during this period. Any employee who did not have the necessary accruals received time off without pay. This combined furlough program resulted in an average 22-23 annual furlough days and a 5 percent reduction in salary for an already lean Staff team. This furlough program has been in place for the last 4 years and during this time the City’s compensation policy was also suspended.

During this same 4 year period there have been staff reductions. In 2009 Oakley had 36 employees, today there are 29. The combined staff reductions and furlough program has resulted in at least a savings of $350,000 each year during this period.

We are glad to be in a financial situation that will now allow us to suspend the furlough program resuming our Staff to a full 40 hour week year round, consequently also being available to our public. Of course the Council reserves the right to reinitiate the program should economic challenges resurface.

However, as we will be asking the Staff to work those additional 8 hours we believe it fair to compensate them for those hours, thus this action would not be accurately deemed a raise.

Consistent with our compensation policy, seven employees will see some level of increase to their pay after having updated our salary ranges. This stems from the fact that a market analysis demonstrated our compensation of those employees as not meeting even the average of the minimum salaries of their counterparts performing the same work in 6 comparable cities (Antioch, Benicia, Brentwood, Hercules, Pleasant Hill, and Pittsburg).

All of our comparison cities have what is known as a step pay grade system. Pay grades provide a framework for compensation by defining the amount of pay available at each step in the employment process. For instance: An employee who is new to a job in a particular pay grade range starts at pay step one of the pay grade. If he or she continues to work in the same role, the pay grade allows upward movement in salary, usually one pay step per year of service within the pay grade assigned to that job. Compensation systems involving pay grades are often used within public sector employment. Oakley does not use this system for pay increases.

While the ranges were updated both on the minimum and high end with averages, unlike most cities with unions we do not offer automatic pay grade/step increases which are typically of 5% per employee per year. There were no merit increases; instead we decided to pay a 2% employee contribution towards PERS and $35 towards their health benefit which too was found to be uncompetitive ($500 less than the average contribution of the 6 cities). We pursued these actions recognizing that having provided a direct raise would have only increased the base salary and consequently the City’s contribution to PERS as well.

While Oakley is small, local governments are faced with many challenges that can be averted, tackled, and overcome through a competent Staff. We only attempt to retain proven and loyal talent for the most efficacious delivery of services to our residents.

Guidelines listing size, weight, media and content limitations as well as other exhibit details are included in the pre-registration packet. Pre-registration packets are available at City Hall or can be accessed by clicking here.

Forms and information are available in English, Spanish and several other languages. For more information contact YMWO program coordinator Gabriela Baños-Galván at 925- 625-7011 or gaby@youmeweoakley.org .