SAN JOSE, Calif. — The best hope for swift pandemic aid to struggling California tenants and landlords might come from Georgia.State lawmakers from California and three other Western states this week are urging their congressional delegations to step up with $100 billion for rent relief — an achievable goal, they believe, if Democrats win two seats in U.S. Senate elections in Georgia, seize control of the upper chamber, and push a significant stimulus bill through Congress.Assemblymember David Chiu, D-San Francisco, chair of the housing and community development committee, said the federal aid...

SAN FRANCISCO — Christopher Samayoa, a former San Francisco police officer who was just weeks on the job when he shot and killed a 42-year-old man during a 2017 chase, is being charged with manslaughter and other felonies in the shooting, prosecutors revealed Monday.San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced the charges at a news conference Monday, marking the first occasion the office has charged an officer in connection with an on-duty fatality, he said. Samayoa has not yet been arrested but Boudin said he expects the former officer to surrender for booking later this week.Samayo...

Ivanka Trump is among a growing number of President Donald Trump’s close advisers who want nothing to do with his legal efforts to subvert the results of the Nov. 3 election, according to a new report.These advisers may publicly act as though they believe Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani can pull some kind of courtroom miracle to prove widely debunked claims of election fraud, Axios reported.“But talk to them privately, and many say Rudy Giuliani and his team are on a dead-end path,” Axios writers Jonathan Swan and Alayna Treene said.“Even Jared and Ivanka think this is going nowher...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Teenagers won’t be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine when adults do, because there’s not yet proof of safety and efficacy.But teen volunteers such as San Jose’s Allyson Eisenman are bringing it within closer reach, participating in a Kaiser study that could accelerate the vaccine’s potential use in young people.“I really wanted to do what I can help us get out of this” pandemic, said Eisenman,17, “and hopefully get back to what will be the new normal.“I’m not the best with needles,” she confessed. “But it was like any other shot.”Until now, vaccination has focused on adults. Wh...

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Many wondered how Don Pellmann could sprint, jump and throw at track and field meets at the age of 100 years old when most people are sedentary.“I say four words: ‘Eat sensibly and exercise,’” Pellmann once said.Pellmann, who died last month at 105, sure had been doing something right.Five years ago, Pellmann became the first centenarian to run faster than 27 seconds in the 100 meters and the first to clear a height — any height — in the high jump. He also broke records in the discus, long jump and shot put at the San Diego Senior Olympics in 2015.The family has been reca...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — For the second time in two weeks, federal authorities have publicly linked a suspected follower of the so-called Boogaloo movement to Steven Carrillo, the U.S. Air Force sergeant accused of assassinating two California law enforcement officers in separate incidents.This time, authorities say that Carrillo, 32, purchased a device from a West Virginia man that was designed to convert an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle into a fully automatic. The alleged purchase was made in January, four months before Carrillo and a Millbrae man he’d met on a Boogaloo Facebook group traveled to the...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — With Donald Trump’s positive coronavirus test casting uncertainty on the final two presidential debates, the pressure is on for Kamala Harris to make the case to American voters that she and Joe Biden belong in the White House when she faces off Wednesday night with Mike Pence in the only vice presidential debate of the election.Suddenly, this debate matters much more than it did prediagnosis. And those who know and study the California senator say Harris will arrive at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City having done her homework.“I can tell you she is studious and prep...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — How risky is it to fly during the coronavirus pandemic?For clues, consider the travel histories of two of the country’s top infectious disease experts, each with parents on the other side of the country. One hasn’t flown since January when the new coronavirus was just emerging as a global threat.The other just flew back to San Francisco after visiting his 90-year-old father in Florida last month — wearing a face shield and removing his medical-grade N-95 respirator mask for just 30 seconds to chug some water and pretzels — and “felt pretty safe” to see everyone else wearing ...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The heavy smoke from wildfires that choked much of California in recent weeks was more than an inconvenience.It was deadly. And it almost certainly killed more people than the flames from the massive fires themselves, health experts say.Between Aug. 1 and Sept. 10, the historically bad concentrations of wildfire smoke were responsible for at least 1,200 and possibly up to 3,000 deaths in California that otherwise would not have occurred, according to an estimate by researchers at Stanford University. Those fatalities were among people age 65 and over, most of whom were livin...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, charged with a dozen felony fraud counts over her defunct Palo Alto blood-testing startup, plans to introduce evidence of a mental condition that affects the issue of guilt, a blockbuster judge’s order has revealed.Federal prosecutors will be allowed to subject the Stanford University dropout to 14 hours of psychiatric testing and examination over two days, Judge Edward Davila said in a ruling this week.Holmes in December notified prosecutors of her intent “to introduce expert evidence relating to a mental disease or defect or any other men...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — New data from medical records in Los Angeles indicate COVID-19 may have been circulating in the United States even before China informed the World Health Organization of the first outbreak of the then-unidentified virus, according to researchers at UCLA and the University of Washington.In a study published Thursday in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the team of nine researchers compared electronic medical records in the UCLA Health system from this winter to the previous five years and found an excess number of outpatient and emergency room visits with complaints o...

More young adults are living with at least one parent than at any point in documented American history, including the end of the Great Depression, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center.The share of 18- to 29-year-olds living at home has increased from 47% in February, before the COVID-19 pandemic, to 52% in July, the poll found. In those five months, 2.6 million young Americans have moved back in with mom and dad.The 5 percentage-point bounce in five months of 2020 is equal to the increase seen in the decade that spanned most of the Great Depression. From 1930 to 1940, the share...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A new law that raises the bar for justifying police shootings is being touted as the reason a prosecutor has decided to press the first homicide charge against a Bay Area law enforcement officer in over a decade.But does the surprise announcement by Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley — who has been vilified by police critics for never having taken a cop to court — signal a sea change in the way officers are held accountable for deadly force or just an anomaly?Although only time will tell, what’s clear is that police officers’ actions in the face of real or perce...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Since the coronavirus pandemic began, the Bay Area has moved thousands of homeless residents off the streets, out of unsafe living situations and into hotels and make-shift shelters.But six months into the pandemic, as some temporary programs start to close, officials, nonprofits and the people they’re sheltering are grappling with one big question: What happens now?“We feel really lucky that we’ve been able to bring so many people inside, and of course no one wants to see us have to exit people to the streets,” said Kerry Abbott, director of Alameda County’s Office of Homel...

OAKLAND, Calif. — When Joe Biden’s vice presidential search committee met with a who’s who of California Democrats on a Zoom call late last month, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf used up every second of her turn to make an urgent pitch for Kamala Harris, a self-described proud “daughter of Oakland, California.”Schaaf has known the U.S. senator since they were both barely 30 years old and extolled her virtues as a fierce advocate for Oakland’s progressive values.But Oaklanders know that Harris won’t be the only one in the spotlight if she’s who Biden chooses to join the Democratic ticket for the Whi...