Protests in Sacramento continue more than a week after the county’s district attorney announced the two police officers who shot and killed 22-year-old, unarmed African American Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s backyard last year will not face criminal charges. Since the news broke, organizers have joined walkouts at local colleges and high schools, demonstrations at the City Council, an ongoing occupation of a Sacramento police station, a die-in at UC Davis and a protest in one of the city...

This winter, the western monarch butterfly population has dipped to an all-time low, and the iconic western monarch migration is on the verge of collapse. The annual Xerces Society Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count tallied only 28,429 butterflies—an 86% drop from the previous count done at the same sites during Thanksgiving 2017, and a dizzying 99.4% decline from the numbers present in the 1980s. It can be hard to wrap one’s mind around the scope of this decline. Another way of viewing it is...

”This gives special access for some of the largest water brokers and privately held agribusiness corporations in California,” said Deirdre Des Jardins of the independent policy group California Water Research. “They are seeking to push junk science that has been previously rejected by the state water board, outside of the water board’s adjudicatory and regulatory processes.” ...

The exposure of David Bernhardt’s enormous conflict of interest takes place at a critical time for Delta smelt, salmon and other San Francisco Bay Delta fish populations. For the first time ever, a fish survey that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) conducts every autumn turned up zero Delta smelt throughout the monitoring sites in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in September, October, November and December 2018....

“The Trump administration won’t be able to get away with killing off our salmon runs if the state refuses to cooperate,” said GGSA director Noah Oppenheim, who is also executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (GGSA), a group representing commercial fishermen on the West Coast. “We call on the Newsom administration to just say no to this attack on California’s salmon fishing families.”...

Two days before the filing of lobbying expenses by PG&E, Consumer Watchdog called for the ouster of the California Public Utilities Commission over its decision to extend a $6 billion credit line to Pacific Gas & Electric in what the group called “an unneeded emergency process that allowed no time for scrutiny.”...

Noah Oppenheim, Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Association called Friday’s lawsuit, “a long overdue wake-up call that the State Water Board must now do its job to prevent the imminent extinction of this irreplaceable fishery. For decades this regulatory process has been captured by water agencies with no compunctions about hastening the end of salmon fisheries. Today salmon fishermen and fishing communities are raising their voice.”   “Unless the Board is...

Instead of “improving environmental conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta” as Jacobs claims the Delta Tunnels will do, the California Water Fix will remove more water from the Sacramento River before it flows through the Delta Estuary in order to facilitate water exports to corporate agribusiness and Southern California water agencies, making the already perilous state of Delta smelt, winter and spring-run Chinook salmon and other fish species even worse....

1,500 people came out to downtown Fresno to Honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on Monday, January 21....

Here are a couple of photos and a video I took at the Women's March in Fresno. It was great to see so many people come together in support of women's rights. The rally and march were held near River Park in north Fresno. Participants were cheerful, it was a nice sunny day and I THANK THE ORGANIZERS for putting together such a nice event....