archives

Michael Mahoney, a Bay Area lawyer, is telling the Central Valley what's best for it in a column he penned for The San Francisco Chronicle.

He argues that plans for the high-speed rail cutting across the state have been co-opted, and it's become a project that's bound to fail. It's a "too many cooks spoiled the soup" take.

My last story from Iraq will appear in tomorrow's Sun-Star.

Even though I've been out of the war zone a couple of weeks, there's often a lag time between filing and publishing a story, especially when there's not a compelling time peg tied to it.

This one's about an issue close to me--PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and what the Army is doing (or not doing) about preventing and treating it among its soldiers. I think this is the first look at the subject from inside an Army unit; most of the articles over the past several months have been written here, in the U.S., about the Veterans Administration and current and former soldiers suffering from the malaise.

I went to a press conference this week about the cutoff of Medi-Cal payments to safety-net health clinics. No money for these clinics means the people most at risk for health problems, the uninsured and the working poor, are going to be left without any doctors or clinics to take care of them.
Before you turn away and say, well, most of them are just immigrants anyway, let me tell you something. A long time ago, when I was a lot younger, I worked one day picking tomatoes. My sister’s boyfriend’s family were farmworkers, and every morning at 4 a.m., they got up and went to work in the heat of the day, picking ripe, red tomatoes.

Now it’s jalapenos from Mexico that are being blamed for stomach illnesses across the United States. It’s kind of scary, not knowing if our food is safe.
But there’s a good way to at least be pretty sure your food is as safe as possible. Buy local.
Yep, buy the peppers and tomatoes and melons that are grown around here. It’s a noble idea, but sometimes it’s hard to do. Take a look around your favorite grocery store next time you’re in there, and see how many of the fruits and veggies are grown overseas.

If California is hit with another drought next year, it could be the worst water drought in California history.
That’s what Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow said this week, after hearing a report that Lake Shasta, the largest storage reservoir in the state, is at only 48 percent capacity.
The next-largest reservoir, Lake Oroville, is at 40 percent of capacity now, and will drop to about 20 percent by the end of December.