Stories you shouldn’t miss for Jan. 7, 2018:
1. Berkeley school board President Judy Appel and her wife, Alison Bernstein, were seriously injured early Saturday when they were struck by a car while walking across Martin Luther King Jr. Way, reports Paul Rogers of the Bay Area News Group$. Appel, who ran for state Assembly in 2018, and Bernstein, who is an attorney with the Office of the State Public Defender, were hit by a vehicle driven by an 81-year-old motorist. Both are in critical condition at Highland Hospital in Oakland.
2. Low-income commuters will receive a 20-percent discount to ride BART and other mass transit systems in the Bay Area, under an 18-month test program, reports Rachel Swan of the San Francisco Chronicle$. The program will apply to “people earning 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or less: $24,280 annually for a single taxpayer, or $50,200 for a family of four. To qualify, people would submit income tax returns or eligibility cards from other social service providers. They would use Clipper cards to pay the reduced fare.”
3. The weekend storm dumped 1.58 inches of rain in the Oakland hills, and one to two feet of snow in the Sierra, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Some parts of the Bay Area received more than 5 inches of rain from the storm, which also caused road and highway closures in the mountains.
4. PG&E is considering selling off its natural gas division — or declaring bankruptcy — as it faces tens of billions of dollars in losses from of the horrific Camp Fire and other devastating wildfires in the past two years, NPR reported.
5. Muir Woods National Monument in Marin County shuttered today because of the federal government shutdown, the San Francisco Chronicle$ reports. “The prolonged shutdown is increasingly affecting other national parks. On Friday, Yosemite National Park officials said the popular John Muir Trail and Mist Trail to Vernal and Nevada falls would be closed beginning Saturday for ‘safety and human waste reasons.’ The Tuolumne Grove and Merced Grove of Giant Sequoias also were to be closed.”
6. And Oakland-native Mahershala Ali won a Golden Globe Award for best supporting actor for his role in Green Book.
$ = news stories that may require payment to read.
