.Monday’s Briefing: Oakland Native Kamala Harris Announces Presidential Run; 39-Story Housing Tower to Break Ground in Uptown


Stories you shouldn’t miss for Jan. 21, 2019:

1. Oakland native Kamala Harris announced today that she is running for president of the United States in 2020. The Democratic U.S senator from California and former Alameda County prosecutor also said that she will hold her campaign kickoff rally at Oakland City Hall this Sunday. “Harris, 54, picked Martin Luther King Jr. Day to make her announcement, a nod to the fact that she is likely to be one of the few women of color in the race. She is the daughter of an Indian-born mother and Jamaican father who met at UC Berkeley in the 1960s and were active in the civil rights movement,” reports Tal Kopan of the San Francisco Chronicle.

2. The developers of a 39-story housing tower are set to break ground at 1900 Broadway in Uptown Oakland, reports Fiona Kelliher of the San Francisco Business Times$. The massive project by Lincoln Property Co. and Behring Cos. will include 452 residential units, 50,000 square feet of commercial space, and about 6,700 square feet of retail.

3. Adnan Khan, 34, was released from custody in Martinez on Friday, becoming the first man in California to have his conviction overturned by the state’s new felony-murder reform law, reports Nate Gartrell of the East Bay Times$. The new law, SB 1437, authored by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, overturned a longtime state law that allowed defendants to be convicted of murder if they were accomplices to a killing and didn’t commit the homicide themselves. Khan received a life sentence after one of his accomplices in 2003 stabbed a man to death during a drug robbery.

4. PG&E may not be able to implement its fire safety program in the state this year because of the utility’s bankruptcy and its serious financial problems due to recent wildfires, the Sacramento Bee$ reports. A federal judge has ordered the utility to inspect all of its electrical lines in the state by June 21, but it’s unclear how PG&E will be able to pay for such a huge undertaking.

5. A federal appeals court upheld California’s low-carbon fuel-standard, which is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but was challenged by big oil companies, reports Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle. The oil industry sought to strike down California’s law on the grounds that state is improperly attempting to regulate interstate commerce, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rejected that argument, noting that the state has the right to try to protect itself from climate change.

6. And President Trump has made 8,158 false or misleading claims during the first two years of his presidency, according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker database. Trump stepped up his lies in second year, averaging 16.5 false or misleading claims per day in 2019, compared to 5.9 in his first year in office.

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