Several students also said Lista was caught up in an episode last year involving links on his YouTube video-sharing account. more ›

Alas, it was not a good weekend for cyclists of the Bay Area. more ›

In more pink slip sadness today, (owned by Denver-based MediaNews Group) eliminated 50 jobs. Fifteen newsroom employees and 19 employees from "other parts of the paper" were let go today. Citing a loss of advertising revenue because to the evil Internet, this most recent workforce slashing represents "a cut of about 5 percent" of the over Merc staff. more ›

Billion-dollar expansion work at Mineta San Jose International Airport came to a halt this morning after a 28-year-old construction worker's arms were severed below his elbows in an accident. Yikes. more ›

Delay, delay, dealy in the deadly tiger case more ›

We're not one to laugh at church vandalism. Ever. But the following story in today's Mercury News is goddamn hilarious. And hilariously bad. more ›

Three weeks ago, a Caltrain conductor told the San Jose Mercury News that "Trains stay on tracks and if you stay off the tracks, it's very easy not to get hit by a train" ("Family of Man Killed in Caltrain Accident Files Suit"). more ›

Todd David Burpee, the man who kidnapped and raped a Palo Alto teen last week, just busted out a heavy confession detailing the hour-plus moments he spent with his victim. It seems that this was all because he was upset and "just [wanted] someone to take out his frustration on after a fight with his girlfriend," reports the San Jose Mercury News. They go on to say that "angry after a fight with his... more ›

Luis Alvarado, 18 -- one of the two men charged with kidnapping, raping, and stabbing to death Sany San -- committed suicide in his jail cell using a bedsheet today. more ›

Well, first the MediaNews conglomerate moves the Oakland Tribune from its iconic downtown Oakland tower (at left) and then they take away recognition of the Tribune's Newspaper Guild labor union. more ›

Beloved Jennine from The Coveted writes here about how this year’s San Francisco Fashion Week denied her and other bloggers precious invitations to cover the event or (worse) any of its VIP, open-bar parties. Enough to drop your coke bullet into the toilet, right?! more ›

We gobble the various food sections up each Wednesday. These are our favorite tidbits from today's offerings: more ›

-A woman's car breaking down caused a huge chain of events leading to her death and three hours worth of traffic on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge. -Where oh where did the snow go? more ›

It's been All Quiet on the Stadium Front lately but just recently, the San Jose Mercury News got their grubby little hands on a whole bunch of complaints the 49ers have filed with the city of San Francisco. Lots of things falling, things flooding, and things breaking. more ›

These are not good days for the Stanford University Cardinal. In an upset with all sorts of subtext, the Cardinal lost to San Jose State University, 35-34 as SJSU came from 20 points behind. This is a huge victory in the same way it was a huge victory when all the slobs beat the snobs in those early 80's teen comedies. Stanford turned the ball over three teams in the second half-- one of them being an interception in the end zone-- and were completely unable to stop a rampaging Spartan running game. With two minutes left in the game, Stanford drove down the length of the field only to have Spartan defender Rakine Toomes knock the ball from WR Evan Moore's hands. SJSU is now 1-1 and Stanford is 0-2. more ›

...had the server not been down. (Things look a little better now after hours, but expect further delays tomorrow). Update: Hey! Comments are back! Try 'em so we can see if they're still screwed up! more ›

Someone please page the karma police, vengeance division: a man is in court for allegedly pimping out a mentally handicapped woman in San Mateo County. He and a buddy had stolen a car they were using to drive her to her assignments, and were caught when the police traced the car's Onstar signal to their place. Wow, evil and dumb. Earlier this week, the tony Los Altos Hills suffered its first armed robbery in at least four years, necessitating a search dog, a roadblock, and a police helicopter. A white man with a heavy Slavic accent and wearing a track suit, broke into a couple's home, duct-taped them up, repeatedly asked them if they were okay, and then made off with $300, two watches, and some costume jewelry. Well, isn't this nice? A man claiming to be the robber called the San Jose Mercury News to say that it was a fake gun and that he's not going to rob the couple again. "They can sleep." The robber said he was looking for something specific, which he wouldn't name, but which a neighbor said was two Ferraris. And a physics teacher at Mount Tamalpais High is in a heap o' trouble, after a parent complained anonymously about his methods of teaching velocity to students, which involved bringing in his Korean War rifle and firing a bullet into a piece of wood in class, and then having the students calculate how fast the bullet was going. The physics teacher says it's completely safe because he has all the students stand behind him when he fires the gun. In this class, he also lies on a bed of nails and asks students to break a cinder block on his chest with a sledge hammer (we can't tell if the sledgehammer part is at the same time as the bed of nails). more ›

Last week, San Jose newspaper publishing company Knight-Ridder was purchased by another company, McClatchy. McClatchy then decided it didn't want to keep publishing the hometown newspaper of the company it had just purchased, the San Jose Mercury News, and put it up for sale. If the Merc News can't find a buyer, it may be forced to go under. The Merc News is a great paper putting out hard-hitting local journalism, and it would be a shame to see it go under. A couple of buyers have expressed interest, but readers and writers have expressed concerns that the interested parties will kill off the good qualities of the Merc. So the Merc News employees (and employees at other papers being sold off by McClatchy) are banding together -- they may try to buy the papers themselves. Also, the Merc News folks have launched a website, Save The Merc, to encourage a "news-friendly" organization to purchase the paper and keep high-quality journalism alive in the South Bay. It's not the best-designed website in the world, but the sincerity of the effort is totally real. Click here to lend your support to the Merc News journalists. more ›

The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that local hip-hop station Wild 94.9's hired a new radio producer for their morning show, Rick Delgado. Who's Delgado? Well, he's the guy who produced and aired the song mocking the tsunami victims for NYC's Hot 97. (The link has the lyrics -- they're not very pleasant.) Why's a genius like that looking for a job out here in the Yay Area? Well, he got the Hot 97 morning show suspended, and then he got fired. So naturally, Wild 94.9 snapped him up. They call him "a major talent" in morning radio, and Delgado explains away the tsunami song as "a matter of bad taste, like a blonde joke." Oh, okay. Delgado's other claim to fame is that he produced the WNEW 102.7 Opie and Anthony morning segment of that couple having sex in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral -- where the male partner then mysteriously died about six months later. (Don't mess with God!) WILD 94.9 says they'll be "closely monitoring" Delgado's shows. Better hope so. more ›

"Takin' it to the streets, takin' it to the streets" by the Doobie Brothers played in the background as the governor confidently strode into a residential San Jose neighborhood to pave a pothole and attempt to get some positive press for his plans to use the new money he found in the budget for transportation. Well, it doesn't seem to have worked. The San Jose Mercury News's coverage appears to be limited to commentary that the governor shouldn't wear white pants if he's going to be working with hot asphalt and tar. And the Chron did some digging of its own and found out: 1) DPT specifically dug a pothole earlier in an otherwise-well-graded street that morning so the governor could have something to fix (though "there was a crack" there before); 2) as one resident put it, "For paving the street, that's a lot of lighting," as the gov's crews set up klieg lights on the block; 3) the governor is billing the city of San Jose for the trouble he caused; and 4) despite the governor's best efforts to avoid protestors, they found him anyways, and started taunting the special election. Poll numbers for the special election are at 62% against, and over 10,000 people showed up yesterday in Sacramento to protest the governor's policies. Here's the rest of the Doobie Brothers' lyrics: Take this message to my brother You will find him everywhere Wherever people live together Tied in poverty’s despair You, telling me the things you’re gonna do for me I ain’t blind and I don’t like what I think I see. Photo by Karen T. Borchers of the Merc News more ›

It's been a while since our last Get Ur Geek On, so we've got a lot of hottness today and will use a bullet list, power-point style, because our attention spans have begun to shrivel in inverse proportion to our abdomen's expansion:
• Dan Gillmor, the last top tech writer standing at the San Jose Mercury News, has decided to leave the Knight-Ridder corporate family to become a 'Citizen Journalist.' Is that a fancy term for unemployed blogger? [From Slashdot]
• PowerLight, of Berkeley, has installed the world's largest solar array in warm, sunny Germany. SuperaffenT****nturbogeil, naturlick! [From SFgate]
• Apple can't keep up with demand for Mac computers, so you better get your butt down to the Apple Store and grab what you can, or your relationship will founder on the rocks of the iRiver. [From Cult of Mac]

San Francisco's not the only Bay Area city rife with local political scandal! San Jose has been roiled for the last month about allegations that city officials worked a secret deal with local darling company Cisco to ensure that only Cisco products would work for the telephone and wireless systems in the new San Jose City Hall currently under construction, thus guaranteeing Cisco the supposedly-competitive $8 million contract. more ›

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