The Conversation

River Park is a serene and pretty enclave near Sacramento State, and I've loved raising my children there. But over the past 12 years, I've learned a danger lurks nearby.

What's a chemical company to do?

A recent conversation made me realize that something critical was missing from the efforts to "fix" the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

California has an extraordinary opportunity to make its water supplies safer and more secure. We can avoid the devastating economic impacts of a natural disaster. We can restore the ecological health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and enhance Delta communities. We are, at last, positioned to achieve these significant benefits through the Bay Delta Conservation Plan.

All eyes will be on Sacramento's own Justice Anthony M. Kennedy this week when the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral argument in two important cases dealing with issues of fairness and equality under the law. These cases ask whether our Constitution allows same-sex relationships to be treated differently than their opposite-sex counterparts.

Like much in Vegas, the façade of Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital is deceiving.

If California voters are ever going to be happy with the $3 billion stem cell bond they passed overwhelmingly in 2004, it might be due to a company called ViaCyte. By next year, the modest lab in San Diego hopes to begin human trials for a treatment that could essentially cure type 1 diabetes.

Sacramento County jailers released Matthew Herrera a week ago Saturday after keeping him separate from other inmates for his safety and theirs. Because he had no clothes, jailers issued him a disposable paper jumpsuit and flip-flops, and sent him on his way.

$7.15 billion. That's the tax burden shifted by wealthy residents and multinational corporations to Californians. We have rules to thwart such gaming of the system – but they lack teeth.

The slow degradation of cooking expertise in America has given nearly half our population an unofficial new ailment – Cooking Deficit Disorder.

January is usually an altogether dreary time to be in London. But it was in that month 160 years ago that an inventive American named Samuel Colt, a genuine Connecticut Yankee, opened a factory in the capital of Queen Victoria's empire to manufacture his signature product, a sidearm then in great demand worldwide.

Efforts to fix Proposition 13 have a problem. A pink elephant problem.

Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act in 1970, a monumental year for the nation's environmental movement. That was the year the nation first celebrated Earth Day and that President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

As the economy faltered over the past several years, the number of people living in poverty in California reached record levels. By the official count, more Californians are living in poverty – 6.3 million – than at any point since the U.S. census started tracking state poverty. And a new poverty measure puts the number of Californians in poverty at 8.7 million, giving our state the dubious distinction of having the highest poverty rate in the country.

The call over the newsroom police scanner came in shortly before noon. A vehicle on fire. A shooter. An elementary school. We looked at each other quizzically.

There's an old riddle: What is always coming but never arrives? Tomorrow, because when tomorrow comes it will be today.

About this time of year, as the holidays and cold weather press in upon us, I invariably think of my father, pine cones and fireplaces.