California Connected Newsroom

California Connected’s newsroom staff has been struck with a rare case of senioritis. This condition is found in television production crews at about the mid-season point. The only known cure is a 2-week break.
Although we are gone, California Connected continues to air in most markets. Check local listings for air times.
We will return after Labor […]

Story Editor Randa Cardwell finds little independent research on organic food.
When we first aired our interview with Dr. John Swartzberg, head of the editorial board of the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter, about the nutritional value of eating organically grown food, we got a lot of reaction from viewers and staff members –– including our host, […]

It’s coming in a bit fuzzy, but the message is growing louder and clearer now: The seemingly endless housing bubble has come to an end.
Yesterday, the National Association of Realtors released a report saying California home sales were down 25 percent in the second quarter of this year. After reports from various sources about […]

“Redistricting” and “redrawing” are how voters are corralled into one area versus another. The process, controlled by the Legislature, often leads to odd, tortured shapes on maps but is a key aspect of how our state democracy functions.
A redistricting reform bill, thought to be dead in the water, narrowly made it pass the state […]

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson once grew it. Now it seems California farmers may too. The Associated Press reports that a bill has passed the state Senate that would allow farmers to grow and sell hemp within California. The plant is a distant relative of marijuana but usually lacks potent “magical” properties.
Hemp “bears no […]

Reuters reports that the California Legislature is very close to passing a landmark bill that would fight global warming.
Gov. Schwarzenegger on the act’s prospects?
“Some environmentalists will say ‘this is not perfect’ and there will be other people in the business community who will say ‘this is not perfect’.”
California is the world’s 12th largest emitter […]

As the California Connected crew works month after month in KCET’s climate controlled office space, we lose touch with the fact that it’s summertime. The only real sign has been the presence of our summer interns.
We had some great ones this year who helped out with everything: research, outreach, story ideas and website updates. We […]

Akira Hasegawa’s Digital-Kakejiku. Photo by Everett Taasevigen.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that artists and scientists from around the world jammed with electronic technology for seven days at the first ZeroOne festival in Silicon Valley. An estimated 50,000 people were in attendance to witness smog-detecting pigeons, giant light shows, karaoke ice-cream trucks and pyrotechnic robots. […]

Los Angeles has long dumped its treated human sewage in Kern County. Last year alone, Southern California trucked about 470,000 tons of smelly sludge over the Grapevine, pouring all of it onto farm fields near Bakersfield. Voters in Kern Country finally passed a law that will ban this operation at the end of 2006. The […]

The RAND Corporation released a study yesterday that painstakingly analyzes what would happen if terrorists detonated a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb at the Long Beach port. The Daily Breeze breaks it down, reporting such an explosion would not only kill tens of thousands but would cripple the world economy.
This is no surprise given mushroom clouds […]