Trans athlete AB Hernandez medaled in all three events at the CA state track finals over the weekend—just days after a last-minute rule change aimed at appeasing the Trump administration diluted her wins with shared titles.

As SFist previously reported, the Trump administration targeted the Fresno-area event, threatening a Department of Justice investigation and potential cuts to federal education funding over Hernandez’s participation. In response, California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) implemented a new policy stipulating that if transgender athletes place first in any event, the cisgender competitor who placed second would also be awarded co-first and full team points.

That policy was put to the test almost immediately on Friday as Hernandez’s jump of 42' 2¾" in the triple jump was the day’s best, however she was declared co-champion with St. Mary’s-Berkeley’s Kira Gant Hatcher, whose jump was more than a foot shorter at 40' 5", according to Southern California News Group. In the high jump, Hernandez tied with two other athletes at 5' 7", again resulting in a shared title – despite clearing the height on her first attempt, which is typically a tiebreaker.

She also claimed silver in the long jump with 20' 8¾", just behind defending champion Loren Webster of Long Beach Wilson.

Hernandez was the only athlete at the meet to win three medals, though the CIF’s revised scoring format prevented her from standing alone atop the podium.

While the on-field action was relatively calm, the atmosphere around the venue was charged. According to Associated Press, A small group of anti-trans protesters gathered outside with signs and chants, and a plane flew overhead dragging a banner reading “NO BOYS IN GIRLS’ SPORTS,” funded by conservative advocacy groups. No organized counterprotest appeared, but many in the crowd cheered for Hernandez as they would any other standout athlete.

Inside the stadium, Hernandez chatted easily with competitors and appeared undeterred by the controversy. She declined media interviews, but her demeanor and performance were steady throughout the day.

Among those cheering her on was Bryn Williams, a high school senior from San Diego who competed in the 800-meter race. "This is still a high schooler," Williams said, according to CBS News affiliate KCAL. "She is learning, she is navigating the world just like we are every single day and that I know I would want grace if I was put in a situation where I had a bunch of light on me and what I was doing. So I encourage people to remember that. We are all human and at the end of the day we are all trying to navigate this world."

CIF defended its decision to uphold Hernandez’s eligibility, citing state law that protects transgender students’ rights to compete according to their gender identity. The new rule was framed as a "pilot entry process," a compromise intended to preserve inclusion while preempting federal retaliation.

Whether that compromise will satisfy federal officials remains unclear. As SFist Joe wrote last week, it’s likely that “reasonable compromises might not be possible or even desired.”

Hernandez’s success, and the highly visible effort to dilute it, underscores how the culture war over trans inclusion in sports is accelerating, with high school athletes increasingly caught in the middle.

Top image: CLOVIS, CALIFORNIA - MAY 30: Transgender athlete AB Hernandez of Jurupa  Valley competes in the girls high jump during the CIF State Track and  Field Championships at Veterans Memorial Stadium on May 30, 2025 in  Clovis, California. (Photo by Kirby Lee/Getty Images)

Previously: Trump Administration Goes After Fresno-Area Track and Field Competition Over Trans Athlete

Authorities discovered that an unassuming warehouse near Fresno housed a large-scale illegal medical lab, filled with bioengineered mice, infectious agents, and a plethora of hazardous materials.

The investigation began in March, when a curious code enforcement officer saw a simple garden hose illegally attached to the rear of the building in Reedley City, according to KRON4. The warehouse, which he thought was a storage facility, turned out to be an illegal lab. It’s reportedly owned by a company operating under the name "Prestige Biotech."

At the time, county public health officials also reportedly found medical devices thought to have been developed on-site, allegedly for use as Covid and pregnancy tests, as NBC reported.

The Fresno County Public Health Department has been "evaluating and assessing the activities of an unlicensed laboratory" the health department's assistant director, Joe Prado, said in a statement Thursday, per NBC.

City Manager Nicole Zieba expressed her shock, stating, "This is an unusual situation. I've been in government for 25 years. I've never seen anything like this," according to KRON4.

The facility reportedly held over 800 different chemicals on-site, including unknown substances categorized as "unknown chemicals." Among the discoveries were thousands of vials, some containing biohazardous materials like human blood, and almost 1,000 laboratory mice, 200 of which were already dead.

Shockingly, when tested by the Centers for Disease Control, at least 20 potentially infectious viral, bacterial, and parasitic agents were detected, including E. Coli, malaria, and COVID, as KRON4 reported, as well as HIV, hepatitis and herpes, according to NBC.

The city, along with state and federal agencies, reportedly worked to remove the hazardous materials from the site, but the nature and purpose of the operation are still unknown, and a criminal investigation is underway.

The company said to be running the operation, Prestige BioTech, now reportedly stands accused of failing to comply with orders, including providing a plan for biological abatement and disposal of the materials.

For now, authorities reassured the public that there is no immediate cause for concern, but residents and officials remain disturbed.

Image via Google Street View.

For San Franciscans, the relative heatwave of this summer simply means “shorts weather” for big holidays like July 4, some interesting heat-related tweets, and perhaps a flex alert or a Spare the Air Day. For ranchers in California’s Central Valley, though the AP reports that the heat is killing off cows by the hundreds, wreaking havoc on dairy production, and that a facility that processes livestock carcasses can’t take any more incoming — so farmers have to bury and compost their own dead animals onsite.

“These last couple days have been torturous on a lot of cattle,” rancher Hank Van Exel tells CBS 13 Sacramento in video above. Van Exel has more than 6,000 cows, but nine consecutive days of temperatures exceeding 100 degrees has him resorting to emergency hacks like fans and mist machines to keep them alive. He estimates that his milk production has dropped 16 percent because of the heat wave. “It’s going to have a significant effect in the whole state, on milk production,” he says.

According to the Fresno Bee, cow carcasses in the Central Valley are typically processed at a grease collection and animal byproduct rendering plant 15 miles from Fresno called Baker Commodities (who knew!). That Baker Commodities facility was already facing a backlog of cow carcasses thanks to the heatwave, and a recent mechanical malfunction at the plant is setting them back even further. This all led the state’s dairy authorities to issue a gruesome-sounding Emergency Morality Disposal Advisory giving guidance on handling “extensively decomposed deadstock” and composting or burying the cows’ remains in emergency landfills.

This is just what happens to cows in significant heat waves, but this year’s is the most lethal for San Joaquin Valley cows in about a decade. In 2006, valley farmers reported around $300 million in losses because of the heat, “In the dairy business, you just have to take what Mother Nature gives you,” Van Exel told CBS 13. “That’s just farming.”

Related: Cowboy Sheriff Feeds 30 Cows Stranded On A River Island Near Yosemite

The 2016 wise-cracking superhero action flick Deadpool remains the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, ‘pool’-ing in a staggering $363 million domestically. But it could have made even more money had five million people not watched it for free on Facebook eight days after it was released, and the Fresno man who pirated that version and posted it to Facebook was arrested Tuesday and faces up to three years in prison according to the Fresno Bee.

21-year-old Trevon Maurice Franklin was arrested Tuesday and charged with copyright infringement. Franklin not only posted the film to his Facebook account — which ostensibly made him much easier to track down! — but also reproducing and distributing copies of the film that federal authorities estimate at a value of $2,500.

It didn’t take long for the FBI to figure out that Franklin had illegally distributed the film, but it somehow took 16 months to arrest him. A federal grand jury handed down an indictment on April 7, and appeared Tuesday in a U.S. District Court. He is not currently in custody, and no bond has been set.

A Deadpool sequel is currently in the works, and is scheduled for release in June 2018. And perhaps eight days later on Facebook.

Related: SFist At The Movies: Deadpool

The parents of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick were in a boating accident Friday evening at Pine Flat Lake in Fresno County, injuring Kalanick's father, and tragically killing his mother. As NBC Bay Area reports, the couple's boat hit a rock and sank, and officers with the Fresno County Sheriff's Office found them on a shore of the lake.

Bonnie Kalanick, 71, died at the scene, and Donald Kalanick, 78, reportedly suffered moderate injuries.

Uber's chief human resources officer Liane Hornsey sent an email to Uber staff calling the incident an "unthinkable tragedy, and saying "everyone in the Uber family knows how incredibly close Travis is to his parents."

Recode's Kara Swisher writes about meeting Kalanick's parents at their Los Angeles home, calling them both "gracious hosts." She says that Bonnie Kalanick "was also deeply proud of her son — she kept pulling out clips she had torn out of newspapers and magazines about him and showing them to me as only a loving mother would."

Kalanick, 40, grew up in the Northridge neighborhood of LA and founded Uber in 2009.

Bees are big business, especially as their numbers are dwindling and their colonies are threatened by various toxins. And since a lot of farmers around California, especially almond growers, now pay big bucks to rent bees for the pollination season, we have a new brand of crime to report on: bee theft. One enterprising Sacramento area man, 51-year-old Pavel Tveretinov, was arrested in Fresno Tuesday on suspicion of stealing an estimated $875,000 worth of other peoples' bees, which he was then renting out for profit, as CBS 5 reports.

According to the Fresno County Sheriff's Office, the investigation into the pilfered bees began a couple weeks ago, on April 28, when detective arrived at an orchard to find 100 hives that were allegedly stolen from a beekeeper in Madera County. They promptly arrested a man in a protective suit who was tending to the bees, who was identified as Tveretinov.

Investigators then followed Tveretinov's trail elsewhere in Fresno County where they found thousands of other hives, 2,500 in all, and they believe he's been stealing hives and renting them for his own profit for as long as three years, and his crimes spanned at least six California counties. One Montana beekeeper said that all of her bees had been stolen, telling CBS affiliate KGPE, "Every colony of bees that I owned except for one. So I basically at the age of 56 had to start over from scratch. They totally put me out of business."

Now some beekeepers are having to hire private security to watch over their precious pollinators. And a special Fresno County prosecutor assigned to agriculture cases will be taking on the case.

Tveretinov is currently free on $10,000 bail, and its unclear whether all the bees are making their way back to their rightful owners.

Previously: New Study Suggests Bee Colony Collapses Triggered By Fungicides

The fatal shootings of three white men Tuesday morning in downtown Fresno are being investigated as hate crimes, and the suspect, a 39-year-old African American man named Kori Ali Muhammad, was known to friends and family for his vocal hatred of white people, and for possibly being mentally ill. As the Associated Press reports, Muhammad shouted "Allahu akbar" as he was being arrested, however Fresno police have made clear that this was not an act of terrorism.

Muhammad went on his shooting spree after a couple of days of erratic seeming behavior and hate-filled messages posted to social media, and police also suspect Muhammad was responsible for the shooting of a white security guard last week, brining his possible kill total to four.

The killings began at 10:45 a.m. with a PG&E worker whom Muhammad allegedly walked up and shot as he was sitting in the passenger seat of his truck. The driver the truck, a fellow PG&E worker who is Latino, drove off unharmed, but the victim, a 34-year-old man, died from his injuries. The driver proceeded quickly to a police station to report what had happened.

Muhammad is then believed to have walked on through downtown Fresno, shooting at another white person and missing, sparing two women in a car who were Latina, and then fatally shooting two more white men, aged 37 and 58, all within less than two minutes before he was taken into custody by police. He allegedly fired a total of 16 rounds in four locations, as the LA Times reports, and as officers arrested him he said, "I did it. I shot them," according to Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer.

Per the LA Times, Muhammad was born Kori Taylor and changed his name to Kori Ali Muhammad as a teenager, likely as he became interested in the teachings of the Nation of Islam — an African American group labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

A grandmother who raised him in a predominantly white neighborhood of Fresno, 81-year-old Glenestene Taylor, tells the LA Times that she couldn't recall her grandson ever expressing any racial animus about anyone. "He would say something derogatory about anybody, didn’t matter about the color,” she said. “If he didn’t like what they did, he didn’t like what they did no matter the color."

But his social media presence tells a different story over the last few days, in particular posts made on Facebook on an account that appears to be his referring to "white devils," and on Saturday, writing, "LET BLACK PEOPLE GO OR THE DOOM INCREASES REPARATIONS & SEPARATION NOW."

Glenestene Taylor says she saw Muhammad on Sunday, and that he was crying saying something about having to move away to another city.

On Monday he wrote to Facebook “MY KILL RATE INCRESASES TREMENDOUSLY ON THE OTHER SIDE ASÈ ALLAH U AKBAR.”

And, Muhammad was already on the Fresno Police Department's radar, and was a prime suspect in last week's shooting. According to the AP, they had issued an alert prior to Tuesday's shooting spree saying that Muhammad was armed and dangerous, and that he was wanted in the shooting death of 25-year-old Carl Williams, a security guard at a Motel 6.

In 2005, after being indicted on drug charges in Fresno, Muhammad was ultimately ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial, as the LA Times reports. According to court documents, he "suffered auditory hallucinations and had at least two prior mental health hospitalizations." His criminal record dates back to 1998.

Muhammad's own father, Vincent Taylor, told the Times "that his son believed that he was part of an ongoing war between whites and blacks, and that 'a battle was about to take place.'" And Taylor said he was glad Muhammad was apprehended, because he was afraid there could have been more bloodshed.

Says Chief Dyer, "If in fact he’s lashing out at white people — white males in this case — that would constitute a hate crime. We believe it is a hate crime, definitely a hate crime."

There's been a development in the bizarre case of the woman found wandering nearly naked, with webbed toes on her both her feet, claiming to be a mermaid near a golf course outside Fresno this week. Local authorities say that, via a tip, and after speaking with the woman's relative, they have positively identified her as a 33-year-old resident of Virginia, but they've declined to publicly give her name because they are concerned she may have been the victim of a crime.

The Chronicle reports that the woman apparently flew into the area last week to potentially scout it out as a future home. The circumstances that led to her ending up in a lake and then wandering nearly nude down a road south of Table Mountain remain unclear. She was found at 3:15 a.m. by a passing motorist, wearing only a sports bra.

The woman had given her name as Joanna, but otherwise could not give police any other information about her identity or how she'd gotten there. In addition to a golf course, there is also a casino in the area.

Per the Huffington Post, Fresno County Sheriff's Office Public Information Officer Tony Botti suggested that police had used some "insensitive" language to describe the woman, and that they would now refrain from doing so.

Arrangements are reportedly being made to reunite the woman with her family, as the Sheriff's Office tells the Fresno Bee.

Previously: Naked Woman With Webbed Toes Found Wandering Street Outside Fresno, Claims She's A Mermaid

Fresno police are seeking the public's help in identifying a woman who was found wet and mostly naked, walking down a road near a lake outside Fresno early Tuesday morning. The woman says her name is Joanna, and that she's a mermaid, but authorities say she did not seem to know who she was, and answered most questions with "I don't know," as KTLA reports.

She was first seen walking in the middle of the street on Millerton Road (Friant Road) about a mile south of Table Mountain near the Eagle Spring Golf & Country Club, which has a small lake in the middle of it.

"She was wet, she said she had been in the lake, said she needed help and needed to be taken to the hospital," said Fresno Police Lt. Mark Hudson, speaking to Fresno NBC affiliate KSEE. When police ran her fingerprints, they came up with nothing, and now they're hoping someone might recognize her and help them get her home.

As Fox News notes, the woman does have two webbed toes on each foot, which could have led to her having some sort of mermaid nickname? She stands five feet, four inches tall and weighs 150 pounds, with brown hair.

She remains unidentified and anyone with information about who she is should call (559) 621-2455 or email the Fresno missing persons unit, Detective Paul Hill, at paul.hill@fresno.gov.

When Fresno police pulled 33-year-old Khamprasong Thammavong over at 5:40 p.m. Monday, they say they were just performing a routine traffic stop. But what followed was anything but routine, from Thammavong's proud advertisement for a Italian luxury goods company to the contents of his home.

ABC 7 reports that Thammavong was already on probation when he was pulled over, and is a documented member of the Laos Bloods, a gang that made headlines last year when they were engaged in a bloody dispute with the Pinedale Bulldogs (what is this, 1860s New York?) over the Fresno-area weed trade.

When the officer realized who Thammavong was, he called the Southeast Violent Crime Impact Team (for more on VCITs, go here) and they searched his home — as a condition of Thammavong's probation, they apparently had that legal right. When they did they found "a semi-automatic rifle and a semi-automatic handgun, which were not registered to Thammavong," as well as "tactical gear similar to law enforcement equipment, numerous items linking him with gang activity, 38 marijuana plants and narcotics paraphernalia."

Thammavong did not have a license to possess or grow weed, ABC 7 reports. He "was arrested for numerous felony charges, including felon in possession of a firearm and cultivation of marijuana."

Thammavong was booked into Fresno County Jail, and remains in custody today. So, Gucci, you know where to find him to offer him a contract for your next big campaign!

Previously: Woman Found In Stolen Vehicle Poses For Mona Lisa Mugshot
Hot Convict Jeremy Meeks Walked Out Of Prison Today, Will Presumably Begin Modeling

Bear detained.All good, no injuries. Cinnamon back to his home in Hume Lake:) pic.twitter.com/nPsnu2Px44

— Fresno Police (@FresnoPolice) December 22, 2015

Beware of hitchhikers — they just might be dangerous, as one, a live bear who caught a ride to Fresno, presumably was. The Fresno Bee reports that the animal was spotted this afternoon and is suspected of getting a ride down from the mountains on a trash truck. It disembarked in town where it was detained, uninjured, tranquilized by animal control officials and local police.

Some have nicknamed the bear Cinnamon, presumably as Paddington had already been claimed. Cinnamon is now headed home to the Hume Lake area, the paper reports.

Related: One Of Those Tuesday Warning System Towers Turned Off Because It's A Hawk's Nest Now

This odd video appeared today on McDonald's YouTube channel, framed like an episode of Mythbusters and featuring its former host Grant Imahara, in which Imahara takes a trip inside the Cargill beef processing plant in Fresno, California where McDonald's beef patties are made.

Imahara is shown the beef inspection area of the plant, where the purportedly high quality beef trimmings are being checked over on an assembly line, and Imahara is impressed as only a paid shill could be by the "nice chunks" of beef bits in front of him.

The plant workers then show Imahara how the beef is ground and then "automatically fed into our patty former," with no steps in between to add any pink slime. (At least not anymore!)

Then they take him to a quality control area where they "replicate pretty much exactly what they do in McDonald's restaurants" by putting some patties on a griddle and frying them up. Things get especially awkward when Imahara asks the dude that works in this area, "So your job is to eat hamburgers every day of the week?" and he says yes, and Imahara does a dance while saying, "Livin' the dream!" We're all supposed to forget about what happened in Super Size Me and assume this guy has a healthy digestive system.

Imahara admits, after they take him to an actual McDonald's nearby, that it's been 15 years since he's had a Big Mac. He bites into one, and he admits it's good.

And in case you missed it, Imahara left the cast of (or was fired from) Mythbusters in August.

It looks like this is the first of a series for Imahara — and part of a larger PR effort for the brand, which has seen some sales slippage in recent years — and he's encouraging McDonald's customers to ask questions about the food they serve, and he'll "find out the answers," or at least pick and choose questions that will not embarrass McDonald's, and answer those.

Related: Burger King's New Commercials Are Ripping Off Billy Eichner

Yesterday in California's flood-prone capital city, a superior court judge twice slammed the brakes on plans for the state's high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles. While the two rulings handed down yesterday won't completely halt the project, experts fear it will cut into public support for an already slow-moving project.

In the first of two rulings handed down yesterday, Judge Michael Kenny blocked the sale of the $8 billion in bonds that Californians approved at the ballot box with Prop 1A way back in 2008. In the second ruling, Judge Kenny sided with a farmer, a homeowner and the Board of Supervisors of Kings County, who are all suing the HSR Authority for not completing all the necessary environmental clearances laid out in the same Prop 1A.

According to one transportation expert cited in the Fresno Bee, the project can still move forward with selling the bonds and building 29-mile test track which recently started construction in the central valley between Merced and Fresno. If anything, Judge Kenny's rulings limit available state funds for a project that is already fighting to find cash. It doesn't affect federal stimulus funds, but even those dollars require the state of California match them with funds from Prop 1A.

Yesterday's rulings also slow down construction of the first segment meant to actually carry passengers: a section from LA to Merced, which is just south of Modesto. That section, which would have been useful for aspiring actors looking to escape their central valley roots, was scheduled to be completed in 2022. In total, the project only has about $6 billion of the $30 billion it needs to finally start zipping Californians back and forth for Giants-Dodgers games.

According to former High-Speed Rail Authority chairman Rod Diridon Sr., the real threat to the project is how incredibly long it's taking to get this train moving. As Diridon told the Fresno Bee, "You've got a project that's been going on for a long time, and it's delayed time and time again by very small groups of people who have used tremendous amounts of money to delay it. There's a tendency on this type of project, if it's delayed for a long time, to become a victim of inertia."

Anyhow, the Hyperloop is starting to look better and better every day. In the meantime, there's always a 12-hour Amtrak ride or 9-hour Megabus trip for anyone extremely averse to airport security.

[AP/Sacramento Bee]
[Fresno Bee]

According to this geographically noteworthy Quora answer, the diving line between Northern California and Southern California has been declared. The line, it seems, goes right through San Luis Obispo. Lucas J Meeker, who created the dividing line, notes: "[T]here is an X factor here which is that the coast from Lompoc to Carmel is generally referred to as the Central Coast, and as a result could be considered somewhat of a floating barrier. You might see the occasional 'bro' in this region repping a 'CenCal' vinyl decal on his lifted truck. He is most likely from the Fresno area, if not from Paso Robles/San Luis Obispo."

But who takes Fresno? Meeker goes on to point out, "Bakersfield is definitely SoCal and Modesto is definitely NorCal, and nobody wants to lay claim to Fresno, the apparent regional culture DMZ." Which, sure. Many claim Fresno is a less than a wasteland. But we sort of like the place. Sort of like it. It's got a heavy Armenian population, raisins grow there, and national treasure Audra McDonald hails from Fresno. So, why not, let's say it's part of NorCal. Sounds good.

Hey, at least it's not Riverside.

(Thanks for the tip, Don Otvos!)