Orrin Heatlie first decided Gov. Gavin Newsom should be recalled during the summer of 2019, when the governor expressed support for immigrants living in the state illegally and told them they didn’t need to open the door for federal immigration agents. Heatlie, a retired Yolo County sheriff’s sergeant, has been among a small group of frustrated Californians trying to oust the Democratic governor for more than a year. Past attempts have failed, but the latest push, which Heatlie started in February, has gotten a significant boost from the pandemic. Political experts say the current effort to re...

Nearly 2,000 Americans have served as United States senators. As of today, 1,928 of them have been men. Only 57 of them have been women. This striking disparity provides a clear mandate for California Gov. Gavin Newsom as he considers a replacement for Sen. Kamala D. Harris, who will become vice president of the United States in January. Without question, Newsom should appoint a woman to Harris’ seat. To do otherwise would be to perpetuate the historic injustices that have deprived women of their equal rights throughout history — and to rob the nation of women’s leadership at a time when we ne...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A second person has died after being wounded in a shooting inside Arden Fair during the height of Black Friday shopping in what was described as a targeted and isolated attack.The victim, a 17-year-old male, was pronounced dead at a hospital several hours later, the Sacramento Police Department said Saturday morning. The other victim, identified by police as a 19-year-old male, was pronounced dead at the mall by Sacramento Fire Department personnel.On Friday night, shoppers and workers quickly evacuated the sprawling shopping hub following the shooting at 6:11 p.m., which ...

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The 49ers might not be able to practice at their Santa Clara facility or host games at Levi’s Stadium in the coming weeks.That announcement was made Saturday by James Williams, counsel for Santa Clara County, in a news briefing as the county’s public health department announced new COVID-19 protocols amid the growing number of new cases in the area and decreased availability of hospital beds.Per the county’s new health guidelines, contact sports will be prohibited in the county for a minimum of the next three weeks. That means the 49ers, Stanford football team, San Jose S...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — To say that Gov. Gavin Newsom is under pressure is an understatement.The chance to appoint someone to the U.S. Senate does not come along often. It has happened only a handful of times before in the state, most recently in 1991, and it represents an opportunity to install an official that could serve in one of the most powerful government bodies for, potentially, decades. The governor must name a successor to the only Black woman in the U.S. Senate and the first woman to ever be elected vice president.It’s a historic appointment, and everybody has an idea of who they want ...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Larry Itliong was one of the most important Filipino American activists and a founding figure in the California labor movement. Yet his influence on the Central Valley is one that often gets lost in popular retellings of California history.“Honestly, people didn’t want to learn about him,” said Marie Mallare-Jimenez, professor of ethnic studies at California State University, Sacramento.Many know who Cesar Chavez is and have heard of the United Farm Workers union that he headed. What many are less familiar with is that it was actually Itliong who reached out to Chavez to c...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The Loyalton fire was 2 days old and starting to pick up momentum in a heavily forested area 50 miles north of Lake Tahoe. That’s when Jeff Holland offered to help.Holland’s logging company, CTL Forest Management Inc., happened to have an array of firefighting equipment — bulldozers, water trucks, a wood-chipping machine called a masticator — parked on a property he owns in Loyalton, just west of where the fire started in mid-August. He proposed hiring out the equipment to the U.S. Forest Service, which was in charge of fighting the fire.He was turned down.“I had several p...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A fight over the future of California gig drivers has drawn nearly $220 million in political spending, making it the most expensive initiative in the history of the state.The latest campaign finance reports filed Thursday show that the Yes on Proposition 22 campaign has received nearly $200 million, mostly from five tech companies: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates and Instacart.Uber has been the biggest contributor to the campaign, which aims to largely exempt app-based gig economy drivers from a state law that requires companies to provide more employment benefits to their...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — PG&E Corp., laboring to get past a history of causing major wildfires, said Friday it’s under investigation in connection with the start of the deadly Zogg Fire in Shasta County.In a brief statement filed with the Public Utilities Commission, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said Cal Fire investigators took possession of PG&E equipment Friday, more than two weeks after the fire began in a remote area north of the Shasta County community of Igo.The disclosure represents a potentially troubling development for a company that’s been trying to shed a disastrous reputation for publ...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Dr. Timothy Albertson said Friday evening that he hopes COVID-19 patients at Sacramento’s University of California, Davis Medical Center will be willing to join a clinical trial of the experimental antibody cocktail that President Donald Trump said he’s taking to combat the disease.“There are trials where they focus on outpatients, and Dr. Stu Cohen (also with UCD) is involved in one of those trials where patients who have been exposed to family members or workers who have known disease can enroll in that trial,” Albertson said. “My trial with this drug is with patients wh...

Smoke from wildfires raging across the West Coast has drifted 1,000 miles or more over the Pacific Ocean, where it has been pulled into a cyclone, satellite images show.A video posted Saturday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows smoke from the fires in California, Oregon and Washington being pulled into a swirl over the ocean.“OK this seems very 2020: The offshore smoke is now getting sucked into that swirling storm out in the Pacific,” wrote Scott Sistek of KOMO on Twitter.“I didn’t think the satellite images of the West Coast fires could get more jaw-dropping and ala...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — In mid-July, California’s pandemic forecast painted a bleak picture for El Dorado County.The state’s so-called “model of models” predicted 45 people with COVID-19 would die within 30 days in the sparsely populated county. With cases surging statewide and more than half of counties on a monitoring list, it was all-but-certain the death toll would soar in the foothills.But there was a problem. The county hadn’t yet even tallied a single COVID-19 death.Ultimately, the prediction for El Dorado County was a total bust in the best way possible. The disease caused by the new coro...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Gavin Newsom had been governor for just one day when he appeared at a Cal Fire station in the Sierra foothills and outlined his plan for protecting California from major wildfires.More advanced helicopters. Better alert systems. Additional firefighters. Infrared cameras for early detection. In the months that followed, the administration sent out crews with chainsaws and wood chippers to cut brush and trees at dozens of projects near fire-prone communities.Nineteen months later, wildfire risks seem as bad as ever in California. A series of lightning strikes touched off hun...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The reversal of Scott Peterson’s death sentence on Monday came as a “big relief” to his family, his sister-in-law said.And while Peterson’s attorney blames the District Attorney’s office for not speaking up when the judge erroneously excused jurors, the lead prosecutor on the case said they looked to the experienced judge for guidance.“To know they are not going to stick a needle in his arm, that is a big relief,” Janey Peterson said. “It was a very long wait and it is a heavy weight” to carry.Scott Peterson is the 38th inmate on California’s death row to see his sentence ...

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — She was afraid of catching the coronavirus — so fearful, in fact, that she switched jobs to pack tomatoes for an employer who seemed to be taking the right precautions. But Maria Claudia Garcia got sick anyway. A farmworker from Venezuela living in the San Joaquin Valley town of Mendota, she came down with a harsh case of COVID-19. She experienced intense fevers and headaches. She lost her sense of smell and taste. Her husband, also a farmworker, got sick as well. Speaking in Spanish, she summed up the ravages of the coronavirus this way: “It’s like your body isn’t yours anym...