Dubbed the Carstens Fire, a wildfire is burning less than 40 miles from Yosemite National Park.

Cal Fire says 150 homes in the area, off Carstens Road, have been evacuated. Several roads nearby are also closed off.

Video of the blaze can be seen above.

As of 2 p.m. Monday, the fire had burned 900 acres and was only 15 percent contained just 24 hours after it started.

In all, more than 700 firefighters are at the scene.

Mariposa County declared a state of local emergency Monday afternoon.

Another annual Lumber Jubilee is over with in Tuolumne City. Healthy crowds were out on Father’s Day to witness four hours of lumber competition before the tug-o-war. Here’s George Laszlo competing with a chainsaw:

The video is bizarre by any standards.

In it, a glistening man with a wild head of hair turns fare gates into balance beams at a San Francisco BART station, stretching and doing back flips buck-naked.

Commuters flee for dear life as he dashes across the station, attacking people at random. Whimpering, they run for cover in a station agent’s booth.

The incident took place at a BART station in May — but the cellphone-shot footage was posted online Tuesday.

And as such videos go, it went viral — quick.

“It happened over a month ago,” said Alicia Trost, a spokeswoman for the Bay Area Rapid Transit, which operates the route . “This is the first time anyone has seen video.”

It took seven minutes for police to arrive after a station agent called for help, she said.

“Police, hurry up and get here, please,” a woman is heard muttering in the video as the man runs amok.

Authorities arrested the man, 24-year-old Yeiner Perez, for attacking a passenger and a transit employee, and took him to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

After that he was released.

Police charged him with misdemeanor battery.

Also, Trost added, “We’re requesting an order from the district attorney to keep him off BART property.”

The Sacramento Zoo uploaded new video of their new baby Sumatran Tiger, CJ.

In the video, CJ is playing with a the trunk of a palm tree and chasing his mom around.

The Sacramento Zoo said in their blog Monday that crews are getting the tiger exhibit ready for CJ’s debut sometime within the week.

Congratulations to all of the Mother Lode classes of 2013! Here is Connections Academy Graduate Kristen Turner speaking at Summerville’s Ceremony on Thorsted Field just two weeks ago:

A leaked document has laid bare the monumental scope of the government’s surveillance of Americans’ phone records — hundreds of millions of calls — in the first hard evidence of a massive data collection program aimed at combating terrorism under powers granted by Congress after the 9/11 attacks.

At issue is a court order, first disclosed Wednesday by The Guardian newspaper in Britain, that requires the communications company Verizon to turn over on an “ongoing, daily basis” the records of all landline and mobile telephone calls of its customers, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries. Intelligence experts said the government, though not listening in on calls, would be looking for patterns that could lead to terrorists — and that there was every reason to believe similar orders were in place for other phone companies.

Some critics in Congress, as well as civil liberties advocates, declared that the sweeping nature of the National Security Agency program represented an unwarranted intrusion into Americans’ private lives. But a number of lawmakers, including some Republicans who normally jump at the chance to criticize the Obama administration, lauded the program’s effectiveness. Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said the program had helped thwart at least one attempted terrorist attack in the United States, “possibly saving American lives.”

Separately, The Washington Post and The Guardian reported Thursday the existence of another program used by the NSA and FBI that scours the nation’s main Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs to help analysts track a person’s movements and contacts. It was not clear whether the program, called PRISM, targets known suspects or broadly collects data from other Americans.

The companies include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The Post said PalTalk has had numerous posts about the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. It also said Dropbox would soon be included.

One outraged senator, Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said of the phone-records collecting: “When law-abiding Americans make phone calls, who they call, when they call and where they call is private information. As a result of the discussion that came to light today, now we’re going to have a real debate.”

But Republican Lindsay Graham of South Carolina said Americans have no cause for concern. “If you’re not getting a call from a terrorist organization, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” he said.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the order was a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice that is supervised by federal judges who balance efforts to protect the country from terror attacks against the need to safeguard Americans’ privacy. The surveillance powers are granted under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which was renewed in 2006 and again in 2011.

While the scale of the program might not have been news to some congressional leaders, the disclosure offered a public glimpse into a program whose breadth is not widely understood. Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said it was the type of surveillance that “I have long said would shock the public if they knew about it.”
The government has hardly been forthcoming.

Wyden released a video of himself pressing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the matter during a Senate hearing in March.

“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Wyden asked.

“No, sir,” Clapper answered.

“It does not?” Wyden pressed.

Clapper quickly softened his answer. “Not wittingly,” he said. “There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect — but not wittingly.”

There was no immediate comment from Clapper’s office Thursday on his testimony in March.

The public is now on notice that the government has been collecting data — even if not listening to the conversations — on every phone call every American makes, a program that has operated in the shadows for years, under President George W. Bush, and continued by President Barack Obama.

“It is very likely that business records orders like this exist for every major American telecommunication company, meaning that if you make calls in the United States the NSA has those records,” wrote Cindy Cohn, general counsel of the nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, and staff attorney Mark Rumold, in a blog post.

Without confirming the authenticity of the court order, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said such surveillance powers are “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats,” by helping officials determine if people in the U.S. who may have been engaged in terrorist activities have been in touch with other known or suspected terrorists.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., stressed that phone records are collected under court orders that are approved by the Senate and House Intelligence committees and regularly reviewed.

And Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada played down the significance of the revelation.

“Everyone should just calm down and understand that this isn’t anything that’s brand new,” he said. “This is a program that’s been in effect for seven years, as I recall. It’s a program that has worked to prevent not all terrorism but certainly the vast, vast majority. Now is the program perfect? Of course not.”

But privacy advocates said the scope of the program was indefensible.

“This confirms our worst fears,” said Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “If the government can track who we call,” he said, “the right to privacy has not just been compromised — it has been defeated.”

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who sponsored the USA Patriot Act that governs the collection, said he was “extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation.”

Attorney General Eric Holder sidestepped questions about the issue during an appearance before a Senate subcommittee, offering instead to discuss it at a classified session that several senators said they would arrange.

House Speaker John Boehner called on Obama to explain why the program is necessary.

It would “be helpful if they’d come forward with the details here,” he said.

The disclosure comes at a particularly inopportune time for the Obama administration. The president already faces questions over the Internal Revenue Service’s improper targeting of conservative groups, the seizure of journalists’ phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media, and the administration’s handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that left four Americans dead.

At a minimum, it’s all a distraction as the president tries to tackle big issues like immigration reform and taxes. And it could serve to erode trust in Obama as he tries to advance his second-term agenda and cement his presidential legacy.
The Verizon order, granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and good until July 19, requires information on the phone numbers of both parties on a call, as well as call time and duration, and unique identifiers, according to The Guardian.

It does not authorize snooping into the content of phone calls. But with millions of phone records in hand, the NSA’s computers can analyze them for patterns, spot unusual behavior and identify “communities of interest” — networks of people in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers overseas.

Once the government has zeroed in on numbers that it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.

Rogers said once the data has been collected, officials still must follow “a court-approved method and a series of checks and balances to even make the query on a particular number.”

But Jim Harper, a communications and privacy expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, questioned the effectiveness of pattern analyses to intercept terrorism. He said that kind of analysis would produce many false positives and give the government access to intricate data about people’s calling habits.

Verizon Executive Vice President and General Counsel Randy Milch, in a blog post, said the company isn’t allowed to comment on any such court order.

“Verizon continually takes steps to safeguard its customers’ privacy,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply.”

The company listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April — 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines.

The NSA had no immediate comment. The agency is sensitive to perceptions that it might be spying on Americans. It distributes a brochure that pledges the agency “is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and Americans’ civil liberties — and its commitment to accountability.”

Under Bush, the NSA built a highly classified wiretapping program to monitor emails and phone calls worldwide. The full details of that program remain unknown, but one aspect was to monitor massive numbers of incoming and outgoing U.S. calls to look for suspicious patterns, said an official familiar with the program. That official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

After The New York Times revealed the existence of that wiretapping program, the data collection continued under the Patriot Act, the official said. The official did not know if the program was continuous or whether it stopped and restarted at times.

The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with electronic copies of “all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls,” The Guardian said.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the “business records” provision of the Patriot Act.

You have less than two weeks to sharpen up the teeth of your chainsaw. The 64th Tuolumne Lumber Jubilee runs this year from Wednesday June 12th through Sunday June 16th.

Norma Raybourn was outside her Santa Fe Avenue home Sunday, celebrating with friends and relatives at a birthday party, when she heard the train.

“It was noisy and it just kept getting noisier,” she said. “Then it was vibrating and it just kept getting worse.”

Raybourn and her family ran to the front of the yard in time to see several cars of a freight train derail, crashing into one another and into a self-storage facility in a massive cloud of dust.

A video taken by Tom Stevenson, who was taking photos at the party, shows the dust enveloping the area before clearing to show cars leaning to the side near the front of the train and off the tracks and crumpled into one another farther back.

No injuries were reported in the accident, which occurred at 4:55 p.m. at East Zeering Road and North Santa Fe, Stanislaus County sheriff’s Sgt. Anthony Bejaran said. And the train, heading north, wasn’t carrying hazardous materials, a concern that had Raybourn and her family hustling back into the rear yard after running out front to see what was happening.

All but three of the train cars were empty, Bejaran said, and Burlington Northern Santa Fe investigators were checking the manifest to make sure everything had been accounted for. Firefighters opened storage units to make sure no hazardous materials had been spilled and nobody had been hurt.

The cause of the accident had not been determined.

Authorities closed the tracks along Santa Fe between East Monte Vista Avenue and East Keyes Road. Bejaran estimated that investigators would be there a few days. He had no estimation of when the tracks would be reopened to freight trains or Amtrak’s passenger service, because some of the rail was damaged.

Amtrak dispatched a bus to carry passengers expecting to get on the train Sunday evening. That included Fabiola Rubio of Delhi, headed back to the University of California at Davis and planning to get on the 7:10 p.m. train. She called Amtrak after a friend who lived in Denair told her about the derailment.

At Raybourn’s home, friends and family stood around and talked about the unbelievable scene they’d witnessed. Some said they at first thought it was a car accident, as one had happened a few years before.

“Everybody was just shaking,” Raybourn said. “We were like, ‘Are you kidding? This is happening in front of our eyes.’ “

There’s a “new” workout routine that is gaining in popularity across the country and it has to do with ditching your standard gym and embracing nature.

It’s called “the caveman workout,” also known as Paleo Fitness, or “the natural movement.”

Shape magazine called the workout one of the top 13 fitness trends to watch for this year.

We must warn you that attempting some of what others have done with the workout is highly dangerous and you can get seriously hurt. For example, a video on YouTube shows a man running along the edge of a bridge testing his balance at a death-defying height.

The people who are taking on the caveman workout are generally bored with the repetitive lifestyle of gym workouts. They are ditching the elliptical machines, treadmills and barbells and embracing the challenges of scrambling around in trees, power lifting rocks, logs or tires.

Most modern fitness programs focus on muscle isolation and cardio-conditioning, but one fitness trainer who loves the caveman workout says the body does not work in isolation; it works synergistically, as a unit. The more varied the movements, the better for health, fitness, and resiliency.

Participants have said with the paleo workout, your mind and body do not get bored, so you avoid fitness plateaus.

There’s even a caveman diet that goes along with this too, focusing on meat, veggies, fruits, and nuts; and giving up dairy, grains, refined sugar, and anything processed.

The flyer says it’s a night of entertainment. The organizer said it’s to benefit Stockton’s children. What could be the problem?

“I think the city should really reconsider your involvement in such an event and look into who they’re promoting as role models for our kids,” said Motecuzoma Sanchez at last week’s city council meeting. “New York from Flavor of Love? Stockton has enough ghetto.”

The event was approved and scheduled for June 8. It’s both a youth conference to discuss career and community options, and a fundraiser for the Boys & Girls Club and I Am Ready Foundation. It’s also a chance to meet celebrities.

“These are producers, these are comedians, these are personalities and models,” event organizer Jason Lee said.

The question is whether or not they are good role models for children, especially when some have displayed questionable behavior on television. Mayor Anthony Silva said he doesn’t know.

“I don’t know who they are,” Silva said. “I have no clue, to be honest with you.”

Well, two are reality TV stars.

At the center of the flyer is America’s Next Top Model Cycle 3 winner Eva [Pigford] Marcille, known as a trash talker and back stabber on the show. Tyra Banks told Marcille in the first episode, “about 80 percent of the girls who come in here have something negative to say about you.”

And then there’s New York, a woman featured on the reality dating show Flavor of Love, competing to win the heart of rapper Flava Flav. When asked around Stockton if people heard of her, the reaction went something like this:

“Didn’t she punch someone?” one resident said.

“Oh yeah, that girl spit in her face!” another resident said.

Clips of New York on the show can be found on YouTube cursing, hitting and badmouthing the other competitors.

Despite what they’ve done on TV, Silva, Lee and some teens still think they’re worth bringing to Stockton and have something to offer youth.

“Stockton is very diverse and there is a certain clientele for these type of performers that get their attention and motivate these young men and women that we have on the streets of Stockton,” Silva said. “If this is something that is going to get them off the streets and get them motivated, than I’m willing to try anything.”

High School junior Jamerson Hunt said he looks forward to meeting musical producer Drumma Boy, to hopefully learn insight into a music career. Hunt also defends New York as an entertainment personality.

“From what I hear, she’s a really nice person,” said Hunt, who’s never met the reality star. “She’s here to help educate and inspire the youth of our city. She’s not going to act like she does on that show.”

The youth conference and comedy roast of Silva takes place on June 8.

Proceeds from the event will be split by the Stockton Boys & Girls Club and the I Am Ready foundation.