News

Starting next fall, public and private universities in California will no longer be allowed to consider an applicant’s relationship to alumni or donors in admissions decisions. Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill last month banning the practice, known as legacy admissions. “The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly,” Newsom said in a statement. We’ll examine what the California ban on legacy admissions could mean for students and for colleges across the country.

A new law that would expand California's electric vehicle rebate hinges on the approval of Governor Gavin Newsom.

Newsom has until September 30 to approve or deny AB 2401, which would expand the state's Clean Cars 4 All program.

We all know that one of the reasons many people opt out of jury service is time away from work and the lack of pay that comes with it.

This week, the Alameda County Superior Court announced welcome news to address that.

Jurors will begin receiving $100 a day and .67 cents per mile for travel to and from the courthouse beginning the second day of jury service after Sept. 2.

That's up from the current $15 a day and .34 cents a mile. 

Two letters from Yale University reached the Callcott family home in San Mateo on the same spring day in 2020. One revealed there would be no place for Sophie Callcott at the Ivy League campus that fall. The other asked her dad, a Yale graduate, for money.

“We burned both letters in the fire pit,” laughed Callcott, now 22. 

San Francisco Giants Hall of Famer Willie Mays racked up plenty of impressive numbers during his Major League Baseball career. He was a two-time MVP, a 24-time All-Star, a 12-time Gold Glove winner and racked up 3,293 hits and 660 home runs.

Mays, who died in June at 93, could be associated with one more number if a resolution co-authored a few Bay Area lawmakers is batted in by the Legislature: 80.

There are more than 200 languages spoken at home in California. But those with the largest proportion of speakers who don’t speak English very well are all Asian languages: Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Khmer, and Thai or Lao. 

These language barriers present challenges for Asian communities when it comes to accessing health care, advocates and public officials discussed at a Tuesday roundtable in Sacramento. 

California's housing crisis is forcing lawmakers to think of new ways to get more people into neighborhoods that are already well established.

Just last month, San Jose reported the median home price was nearly $1.4 million - that's an increase of 10% from the previous year.

"I couldn't afford to live here if I didn't buy my house 25 years ago," expressed Joyce Higashi a San Jose homeowner who just added an accessory dwelling unit in her backyard.

Many young people or families will never be able to live in San Jose. That is, unless they consider buying an ADU.

New research shows that California’s existing electric vehicle (EV) tax credits mostly benefit high-income individuals, while largely failing to reach other Californians. This is a problem for both our climate and people’s pocketbooks. Targeting EVs to low-income, high-mileage households would not only save low-to-middle-income Californians hundreds of dollars a year on fuel costs but also help cut emissions faster and more efficiently.

Universities across the country lost the right to consider the race of applicants in admissions decisions last year when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in higher education.

But five California private schools, including Stanford and Santa Clara universities, continue to give preferential treatment to the children of alumni or wealthy donors who apply for admission, which was not part of the court’s ban.

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Starting July 1, credit card payment networks must provide a unique identifying code for gun and ammunition retailers. Those four-digit identifiers, known as “merchant category codes,” already appear on credit card statements for most types of businesses, including grocery stores, hotels and gas stations, and help payment networks offer rewards and track spending trends.