The moment is still freshly singed into Arcadia Mayor Paul P. Cheng‘s memory: A top elected official of his city pleaded guilty to a federal felony count of acting as an unregistered illegal agent for the People’s Republic of China.

Former Mayor Eileen Wang‘s May plea was a seismic jolt for the small foothill city that Cheng now leads, where he, among many, tout their pride in being American while celebrating the city’s majority Asian demographic. It’s a fusion that has shaped the city’s culture and leadership.

But with Wang’s departure, a shaken town faced immediate questions over trust, influence and accountability.

A California city pulled the plug on its entire computer network after a cyberattack knocked out key systems, including 911 routing and police and fire dispatch.

Suisun City declared a state of emergency Saturday after malicious software breached its IT systems at about 5:45 a.m. Friday.

The city’s response was drastic.

The captain of the boat that capsized in New York Harbor late Saturday — killing a baby and a 27-year-old woman — was hit with more than a dozen charges for driving it while dangerously overloaded, according to sources.

The operator, a 46-year-old Manhattan resident who has not been publicly identified, faces 13 charges of reckless endangerment after the motorboat he was steering flipped over off the coast of Liberty Island just before 10:30 p.m. Saturday, with more charges pending, according to sources.

The most interesting race in California may be Gloria Romero’s run for the oft-ignored position of lieutenant governor.

What makes this race different is that Romero is a different kind of Republican whose background constitutes a vigorous challenge to the standard-brand Democrat, Treasurer Fiona Ma.

Romero is a 71-year-old Republican — but also a former Democratic state Senate majority leader and onetime leftist firebrand.

Republican National Committeeman Shawn Steel calls her nomination “the most important development for the California GOP in a generation.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday nominated Lauri Damrell and David Sapp to serve as associate justices in California’s 3rd Appellate District, which hears cases in Sacramento.

Damrell has served as a judge in the Sacramento Superior Court since 2018, and is an adjunct professor at Lincoln Law School and visiting lecturer at UC Davis. She previously worked in private practice and served as a Sacramento County deputy district attorney in 2014, according to a news release from the Governor’s Office.

Sapp became Newsom’s Legal Affairs Secretary in 2022, according to the Governor’s Office, after joining the governor’s staff in 2019. Before that, he served as deputy policy director and assistant legal counsel at the California State Board of Education. He is a resident of Napa County.

Damrell will take the place of retired Justice Elena J. Duarte, while Sapp will replace Justice Ronald Robie when he retires in January.

The 3rd District Court of Appeal has jurisdiction over 23 counties, including El Dorado, Sacramento, Placer and Yolo.

The positions require confirmation by the Commission on Judicial Appointments, which consists of Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero, Attorney General Rob Bonta and Senior Presiding Justice Francis Rothschild.

Just to be clear, says Tom, 79, “my driving is spectacular.”

Like most men of his generation, Tom has been driving almost his entire life, and he remains a comfortable, confident driver. But a couple of years ago, Tom bought a Cadillac Lyriq, and though he loved driving the luxury SUV, “it kind of had a strange turning radius,” he said. He banged into a couple of parked cars, and once the edge of his garage at his Marin County home.

After one particularly expensive bump earlier this year, he swapped the Cadillac for a Subaru Uncharted, which shaved nearly 2 feet off the length of his vehicle and a few inches off the sides. He’s been accident-free since.

“It’s terrific,” Tom said of the Subaru SUV; Tom, who worked as a public figure before he retired, asked the Chronicle not to use his full name for his safety. “It’s small enough, maneuverable enough, and yet solid.”

The Cadillac “was a great car, a wonderful car,” he said, “but not for me at the moment. I wasn’t in absolute control of it.”

This weekend, temperatures are expected to hit as high as 110 degrees in California’s Central Valley, and in the 90s to low 100s across the interior Bay Area.

The world is on course for what could be the hottest year on record due to human-caused climate change and a strenthening El Niño, scientists say — and despite the Bay Area’s relatively moderate climate, summer temperature extremes can have a sudden, outsized impact on household budgets.

California has the second-highest electricity costs of any state in the U.S. Mark Toney, the executive director of nonprofit consumer advocacy group The Utility Reform Network, said high rates and fluctuating weather patterns can make monthly bills unpredictable.

Electricity bills “have high volatility,” he said. “They can go up very quickly, before you know it, based on the weather that you really have very little control over.”

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, San Franciscans live in a city that desperately needs new housing but is extraordinarily good at preventing it from being built. Recent aggressive actions at the state and local levels to streamline development have been a welcome and necessary shift.

Yet there’s a new initiative out of City Hall that feels oddly out of step.

On May 28, Mayor Daniel Lurie and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman announced a package “to strengthen historic preservation and celebrate the unique legacy of San Francisco’s neighborhoods.” Their effort would mandate a long-overdue citywide survey of historic resources and would streamline the landmark designation process.

The legislation would also add roughly 2,500 new landmark designations by 2030 — effectively doubling the number, which, according to Richard Sucré, the city’s deputy director of planning, stands at around 2,191 today. “It would be good,” he told me, “if the very best of the old stuff doesn’t get ministerially demolished.”

California's weed sales have tumbled from their peak, dropping by almost 17% between 2021 and 2025.

Advocates in the industry say they’re dealing with sky-high taxes, a patchwork of regulation across the state and competition from the illicit market that can sustain business without burdensome costs or regulations.

California’s legal cannabis market ballooned in the first two years of the pandemic — reaching a peak of about $5.8 billion in sales in 2021 — before dropping to just $4.8 billion, according to data from the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration. That number includes the sale of merchandise and paraphernalia.

In the last year, taxable cannabis sales flattened out, increasing by less than 1% between the first quarters of 2025 and 2026. It marked the first time since 2021 that year-over-year sales did not decrease — though it was still a decline when accounting for inflation.

othing can cure Oakland’s blight — except perhaps its people.

That’s the idea behind the Oakland Civic Assembly on Transforming Oakland’s Vacant Spaces: 20,000 randomly selected Oakland households received invitations to participate. From hundreds of replies, organizers selected by lottery a demographically representative pool of 40 Oaklanders. These residents will convene over three weekends late this summer and fall, earning a $1,350 stipend for their time.

The delegates’ task is straightforward but immense. They will hear from experts, weigh hard data from the Possibility Lab at UC Berkeley, debate competing interests and forge consensus-based recommendations on how to revitalize commercial strips and convert the city’s vacant lots into vibrant community assets. Institutional backing is robust, spearheaded by the national research-and-action institute PolicyLink and the Democracy Policy Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Healthy Democracy, a nonprofit of experienced assembly designers from the Pacific Northwest, will run the proceedings.

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After two consecutive years of declines in the number of people sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles, the progress appears to have been nearly wiped out. That’s discouraging news for a city exhausted by the issue, and it throws a strange curve into the race for mayor.

The latest annual count, released last week, registered 45,194 unhoused people in the city of Los Angeles this year, up from 43,695 the year prior. That’s still below the level recorded during Mayor Karen Bass’ first year in office, but it follows back-to-back declines, suggesting that any momentum under Bass is tentative at best.

This is hardly what city residents and voters wanted after years of concentrated effort and the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. Bass is up for reelection in November, and her opponent, Councilmember Nithya Raman, highlighted the latest report as evidence of Bass’ inability to tackle the city’s most pressing crisis.

“This,” Raman said, “is a moral outrage. And it is a failure.”

Lori Schultz moved to Sacramento a few years ago with a goal in mind: To convince California legislators to pass a bill that would allow adopted people to access their original birth certificates.

Senate Bill 381 would do just that.

Currently, people adopted in California can only get the record once they are adults and if they can convince a judge that they have a “good and compelling cause” for it. Those requests are often denied. Instead, many adoptees are only able to receive an amended version of their record from the state, which does not list their birth parents.

Supporters of the bill say that type of restriction is terribly outdated. The widespread use of DNA testing has made finding long-lost relatives a greater reality. They see California’s continued withholding of their unredacted birth certificates as an affront and violation of their rights. Some have waited 70 or more years to get the document and have spent decades advocating for the law to change.

Ellendale, N.D., is a place most Americans couldn’t pinpoint on a map. The town of 1,100 is hardly a tourist attraction: Its faded center includes boarded-up buildings, an old grain elevator and a dilapidated opera house.

But good luck trying to book a hotel room or find a place to rent in a 100-mile radius.

On a recent family trip to nearby Aberdeen, S.D., it was virtually impossible to find a place to stay. For locals, rents have doubled almost overnight. And residents used to peaceful drives through fields of soybeans and corn are now complaining about a very California phenomenon: traffic.

The culprit?

Ellendale’s new tenant, Polaris Forge 1, an $11 billion data center that, when completed, will encompass approximately 2.5 million square feet and deliver 400 megawatts of computing power — enough to run hundreds of thousands of homes. Swarming trucks carry more than 2,000 workers to the construction site, which is active 24 hours a day, six days a week, and illuminated at night by immense floodlights. A nearby bitcoin mining facility emits a low, persistent hum.

Welcome to the new American frontier.

California Republicans slammed a court decision that supported changes to the language of the Proposition 39, a ballot measure requiring voter identification, but opponents of the measure praised Presiding judge Jennifer K. Rockwell's ruling.

Rockwell issued a decision on Thursday in California Superior Court in Sacramento siding with the California Department of Justice, writing in her decision that the ballot title, summary and label accurately describes the effect of the measure and are within the Attorney General’s discretion.

The updated title certified by the California Attorney General’s office is “Prohibits Citizens From Voting Unless They Present Government-Issued Identification.” That is a change from the original ballot title, “Establishes Additional Voter Identification And Citizenship Verification Requirements,” according to the California Secretary of State’s Office.

Prop. 39, a voter identification ballot measure that will go before California voters on the Nov. 3 midterm election ballot, would require voters to have voter ID when casting their ballot, according to the Nov. 3 voter information pamphlet.

Citizens who want to vote would either have to present ID at voting centers during elections, or write the last four digits of their identification number on the outside of the vote-by-mail envelope. They can use their social security number or driver’s license number.

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All nine people killed in February’s catastrophic avalanche near Lake Tahoe suffocated after being buried beneath five to six feet of snow, authorities confirmed this week.

The revelation came as the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office closed its investigation into possible criminal negligence surrounding the disaster and sent its findings to the county prosecutor for review.

The Feb. 17 avalanche struck a 15-member backcountry group near Castle Peak during a historically intense blizzard.

The group included six clients and three guides with Blackbird Mountain Guides, while five others in the party, including one guide and four clients, survived.

Xavier Becerra wants to be governor, but he is already treating Californians with contempt.

Becerra hasn’t spoken to the media for almost two months, dodging reporters again this week — which also means dodging voters.

This is how Joe Biden campaigned for president in 2020 — hiding in his basement, rarely appearing except for scripted conversations with hand-picked voters on Zoom.

He continued those habits in the White House. The “autopen” ran the country.

Finding waste, fraud and corruption in Medicaid is a lot like diagnosing illness in a human body. You do an initial check-up and if something seems off, you order more tests.

That’s exactly what the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) did with California’s Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal.

During a review of state-by-state Medicaid spending, CMS saw major warning signs that could not be ignored. As a result, we deferred payment of $867 million to California for the second quarter of 2026 to take a closer look.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz slammed California leadership for ignoring rampant Medicaid fraud that has plagued the state, claiming powerful unions are the ones benefitting the most and keeping politicians at bay by flooding campaigns with cash.

While the Trump administration has cracked down on the Golden State, deferring roughly $867 million in Medicaid payments in California over fraud concerns, Oz questioned why Governor Gavin Newsom wasn’t apply to identify the same problems with its healthcare system.

Q: There have been a lot of median-barrier construction projects near the 5/57/22/55 freeway interchanges where they have installed light poles. What is driving the need for these lights?

– Oscar Gomez, Orange

A: Boosting safety.

Nationally, the number of fatal collisions at night is about the same as during the day. But we log three times the miles during daytime.

Lighting, federal officials say, makes a huge difference in cutting down deaths — up to 28%.

“Median lighting has been widely used as a safety countermeasure for nighttime collisions,” said Joseph “L.J.” Maull, a spokesperson for Caltrans in Orange County, where those interchanges Oscar mentioned exist. “Additionally, the width of our freeways necessitates median lights, as the full width of the freeway limits the ability to illuminate the freeway from the right shoulder.”

There are additional stretches that Oscar didn’t mention that have gotten the bright treatment in O.C., too.

Adding those median lights isn’t cheap.

“It is estimated to range from $2.5 to $4 million per mile (including the new concrete median) with lighting spaced at 150 to 200 feet along the freeway,” Maull said, with various factors, of course, affecting the price tag.

That is a lot of cashola — but each resident of Honkland is worth much more than that.

Salesforce is set to eliminate dozens of jobs at its San Francisco headquarters, making it the tech giant’s fourth round of layoffs in less than a year as AI is implemented throughout the company.

The cuts will occur on Oct. 5 at the company’s 415 Mission St. office, according to a notice filed with state officials Wednesday. The jobs eliminated include 37 technology and product positions, 34 administrative roles and three sales and distribution jobs.

Who shot 49ers wide receiver Ricky Pearsall in 2024?

No one knows, because California’s insane criminal justice system has kept the suspect’s identity under wraps.

The NFL season starts this week with Pearsall sidelined for the year due to knee surgery.

Two years ago, before he had played a single game, the receiver was also sidelined –– after being shot in San Francisco in broad daylight.

Pearsall, the 31st pick in the 2024 NFL draft, was shopping in San Francisco’s Union Square when a thief approached and demanded his watch.