Top News Stories
S.T.O.P. Lying?
If you thought the fight to build an arena in downtown Sacramento was going to get easier once Sacramento kept the Kings, think again.
Video shot by Cory Vincent, posted on YouTube shows the group “S.T.O.P.,” also known as the Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork is trying to gather enough signatures to force a citywide vote on the arena.
Though, the information used to gather signatures isn’t necessarily truthful.
In the video, a signature gatherer can be overheard saying, “They’re trying to charge us to build a new arena in Sacramento… Yeah, they’re gonna increase taxes.”
Enter DowntownArena.org.
It’s a joint effort of Crown Downtown and the Sacramento Region Builders to stop the misinformation.
S.T.O.P. needs to gather 33,000 valid signatures from city voters and seem to be using scare tactics to do so.
So far S.T.O.P. has about half those signatures and has until December to get them all.
Roseville Poolside Dunk Video
When Dominic Marrero of Roseville, California and his six friends got the idea to make a dynamic slam dunk video in six seconds and post it on the internet, they never thought it would go viral.
“I woke up the next morning and it was at 1500,” said Marrero.
Two days later, more than 90,000 people had watched it. Even ESPN and Nike Basketball tweeted the video, calling the dunk amazing.
“It had to be perfect because you have to catch the ball from across the pool, then he would have to throw it back. Then then the guy going down the slide had to go down at the right time to catch it,” said Marrero.
It sounds like a lot of work, but the teens did it in one day.
“We were attempting it some bad times. We were not getting it right,” said Marrero. “We went and ate and talked about it. We came back and kept on practicing. That last time we just got it and it was just crazy.”
The friends have always played ball together, but for Dominic – the last guy seen dunking the ball – he hopes to someday make it to the NBA.
Dominic plans to attend college first and is hoping to get a scholarship.
Contemporary English Lesson?
The prosecution’s “star-witness” in the George Zimmerman murder trial, Rachel Jeantel, on Monday made her first public appearance since testifying earlier this month about the death of Trayvon Martin. She claimed the jury’s verdict was “racial” and referred to the mostly white jury as “old school.”
Jeantel made a number of surprising statements while talking to CNN’s Piers Morgan about the verdict, black culture and the “n-word”. Jeantel gave Morgan a lesson on the use of the n-word during her interview on CNN. She said “n***a,” spelled with an “a,” can be used to describe any male regardless of race. The other one, “ni**er,” is the offensive one. CNN refused to redact (bleep) the use of any variation of the word.
She said she wishes she would have used the n-word during her testimony.
Trayvon Martin Supporters Burn The American Flag
Protesters angered by the acquittal of George Zimmerman held demonstrations in three California cities, but broke windows and started small street fires Oakland, police said.
The Oakland police dispatch office said about 100 people protested, with some in the crowd breaking windows on businesses and starting small fires in the streets. As the protest wound down with the crowd dispersing, the office said that as of 2 a.m. PDT it had no word of any arrests.
Local media reports said some Oakland marchers vandalized a police squad car and police formed a line to block the protesters’ path.
The Oakland Tribune said some windows on the newspaper’s downtown offices were broken, and footage from a television helicopter show people attempting to start fires in the street and spray painting anti-police graffiti.
Protesters also reportedly burned an American and a California state flag and spray painted Alameda County’s Davidson courthouse.
In a statement Sunday, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said Martin’s death “raised powerful, incredibly difficult issues” surrounding racial profiling, but she criticized vandals who “dishonored the memory of Trayvon by engaging in violent activities that hurt our growing economy and endangered people.”
“We will not tolerate violence in our city,” Quan said.
Pilot Name Hoax Makes It To Air
Bay Area television station KTVU incorrectly reported the names of the pilots flying the ill-fated Asiana Airlines Flight 214 using racially insensitive monikers.
The segment on Friday at noon that referred to two of the pilots as “Captain Sum Ting Wong,” and “Wi Tu Lo,” has gone viral and drawn heavy criticism on the Internet.
Two teenage girls from China and another passenger were killed and more than 180 people injured when the Boeing 777 clipped a sea wall and slammed into a runway Saturday at San Francisco International Airport.
Asiana Airlines has identified the pilot and copilot as Lee Kang-kook and Lee Jung-min.
The KTVU newscast was captured in a video posted to YouTube, in which the station displayed four incorrect pilot names on the screen and an anchor read them aloud.
“The NTSB has confirmed these are the names of the pilots aboard Flight 214 when it crashed,” the anchor said. “We are working to determine exactly what roles each of them played during the landing on Saturday.”
Another YouTube video showed an apology, read by the same anchor.
“These names were not accurate despite an NTSB official in Washington confirming them late this morning,” the anchor said. “We apologize for this error.”
The station issued a statement Friday afternoon acknowledging it had “misidentified the pilots involved.”
“Prior to air, the names were confirmed by an NTSB official in the agency’s Washington, D.C. office,” the statement posted on the station’s website said. “Despite that confirmation, KTVU realized the names that aired were not accurate and issued an apology later in the newscast.”
“We sincerely regret the error and took immediate action to apologize, both in the newscast where the mistake occurred, as well as on our website and social media sites,” Tom Raponi, KTVU/KICU vice president and general manager, said in the statement. “Nothing is more important to us than having the highest level of accuracy and integrity, and we are reviewing our procedures to ensure this type of error does not happen again.”
Asiana Jet Crash At SFO
Pilots of Asiana Flight 214 were flying too slowly as they approached San Francisco airport, triggering a cockpit warning that the jetliner could stall, and they tried to abort the landing but crashed barely a second later, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday.
While federal investigators began piecing together what led to the crash, San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault disclosed that he was looking into the possibility that one of the two teenage passengers who died Saturday actually survived the crash but was run over by a rescue vehicle rushing to aid victims as the plane burst into flames. Remarkably, 305 of 307 passengers survived the crash and more than a third didn’t even require hospitalization. Only a small number were critically injured.
Accident investigators are trying to determine whether pilot error, mechanical problems or something else was to blame for the crash. At a news conference, NTSB chief Deborah Hersman disclosed the Boeing 777 was traveling at speeds well below the target landing speed of 137 knots per hour, or 157 mph.
“We’re not talking about a few knots,” she said.
Hersman described the frantic final seconds of the flight as the pilots struggled to avoid crashing.
Seven seconds before the crash, pilots recognized the need to increase speed, she said, basing her comments on an evaluation of the cockpit voice and flight data recorders that contain hundreds of different types of information on what happened to the plane. Three seconds later, the aircraft’s stick shaker — a piece of safety equipment that warns pilots of an impending stall — went off.
The normal response to a stall warning is to boost speed and Hersman said the throttles were fired and the engines appeared to respond normally.
At 1.5 seconds before impact, there was a call from the crew to abort the landing.
The details confirmed what survivors and other witnesses said they saw: an aircraft that seemed to be flying too slowly just before its tail apparently clipped a seawall at the end of the runway and the nose slammed down.
Pilots normally try to land at the target speed, in this case 137 knots, plus an additional five more knots, said Bob Coffman, an American Airlines captain who has flown 777s. He said the briefing raises an important question: “Why was the plane going so slow?”
The plane’s Pratt & Whitney engines were on idle, Hersman said. The normal procedure in the Boeing 777, a wide-body jet, would be to use the autopilot and the throttle to provide power to the engine all the way through to landing, Coffman said.
There was no indication in the discussions between the pilots and the air traffic controllers that there were problems with the aircraft.
Among the questions investigators are trying to answer was what, if any, role the deactivation of a ground-based landing guidance system due to airport construction played in the crash. Such systems help pilots land, especially at airports like San Francisco where fog can make landing challenging. The conditions Saturday were nearly perfect, with sunny skies and light winds.
The flight originated in Shanghai, China, stopped over in Seoul, South Korea, before making the nearly 11-hour trip to San Francisco. The South Korea-based airline said four South Korean pilots were on board, three of whom were described as “skilled.”
Among the travelers were citizens of China, South Korean, the United States, Canada, India, Japan, Vietnam and France. There were at least 70 Chinese students and teachers heading to summer camps, according to Chinese authorities.
Fei Xiong, a Chinese passenger , was traveling to California so she could take her 8-year-old son to Disneyland. The pair was sitting in the back half of the plane. Xiong said her son sensed something was wrong.
“My son told me: ‘The plane will fall down, it’s too close to the sea,'” she said. “I told him: ‘Baby, it’s OK, we’ll be fine.'”
When the plane hit the ground, oxygen masks dropped down, said Xu Da, a product manager at an Internet company in Hangzhou, China, who was sitting with his wife and teenage son near the back of the plane. When he stood up, he said he could see sparking — perhaps from exposed electrical wires.
He turned and could see the tail where the galley was torn away, leaving a gaping hole through which they could see the runway. Once on the tarmac, they watched the plane catch fire, and firefighters hose it down.
“I just feel lucky,” said Xu, whose family suffered some cuts and have neck and back pain.
In the chaotic moments after the landing, when baggage was tumbling from the overhead bins onto passengers and people all around her were screaming, Wen Zhang grabbed her 4-year-old son, who hit the seat in front of him and broke his leg.
Spotting a hole at the back of the jumbo jet where the bathroom had been, she carried her boy to safety.
“I had no time to be scared,” she said.
Authorities immediately closed the airport and rescuers rushed to the scene. A United Airlines pilot radioed the control tower, saying: “We see people … that need immediate attention. They are alive and walking around.”
“Think you said people are just walking outside the airplane right now?” the controller replied.
“Yes,” answered the pilot of United Flight 885. “Some people, it looks like, are struggling.”
At the crash scene, police officers knives up to crew members inside the burning wreckage so they could cut away passengers’ seat belts. Passengers jumped down emergency slides, escaping from billowing smoke that rose high above the bay. Some passengers who escaped doused themselves with water from the bay, presumably to cool burns, authorities said.
By the time the flames were out, much of the top of the fuselage had burned away. The tail section was gone, with pieces of it scattered across the beginning of the runway.
Foucrault, the coroner, said senior San Francisco Fire Department officials notified him and his staff at the crash site on Saturday that one of the 16-year-olds who was kilkled may have been struck on the runaway. Foucrault said an autopsy he expects to be completed by Monday will involve determining whether the girl’s death was caused by injuries suffered in the crash or “a secondary incident.”
He said he did not get a close enough look at the victims on Saturday to know whether they had external injuries.
Foucrault said one of the bodies was found on the tarmac near where the plane’s tail broke off when it slammed into the runway. The other was found on the left side of the plane about 30 feet away from where the jetliner came to rest after it skidded down the runway.
The Goodwill Payroll
Goodwill admits that they pay some disabled workers far less than the minimum wage, while some of the executives earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. But they have their reasons. Not everyone likes it. An educational report from NBC News.
Fireworks Over Don Pedro
Happy 4th of July! We found and uploaded this fireworks finale at Lake Don Pedro in 2011.