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Brentwood: Manslaughter charge filed in Thanksgiving 2021 fatal crash

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:37 GMT

MARTINEZ — A 38-year-old man has been arrested and charged with killing a Vallejo resident in a crash that occurred on Thanksgiving 2021, court records show.Austin Landers was charged in late March with one count of vehicular manslaughter involving gross negligence, a felony. He is accused of killing 22-year-old Bryan Lopez-Islas, the driver of a vehicle that was struck head-on after Landers’ car allegedly swerved into oncoming traffic.Landers pleaded not guilty in April. Earlier this month, he posted $50,000 bail and was released from jail, court records show. He is next due in court on June 16 for a preliminary hearing, where a judge will review evidence against him and determine whether there is enough to send the case to trial.Lopez-Islas was killed a little before 6 a.m. on Nov. 25, 2021. The crash occurred in unincorporated Contra Costa County, near Brentwood, at Vasco Road and Walnut Boulevard, police said at the time. Lopez-Islas was driving a Toyota Corolla that...

‘Abysmal’: Lies, neglect led to costly Santa Clara County jail injury, new report says

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:37 GMT

A new report on a high-profile jail injury case in Santa Clara County details how deputies and medical staff let a mentally ill man lay paralyzed in his cell for more than 24 hours, then lied about the care they gave him to cover up their neglect — all of which led to a $7 million county payout.The report on the treatment of Juan Martin Nuñez in a Main Jail psychiatric unit, which was heard by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, coincided with a unanimous board vote to require the county to publicly report, on a quarterly basis, large tort settlements.At the top of the report, the county’s Office of Correction and Law Enforcement Monitoring — a civilian police auditing arm — called the way jail staff handled Nuñez “abysmal,” particularly with how they dismissed his repeated cries that he was paralyzed and needed medical attention, and called out how deputies and jail nurses refused to believe him.“It cannot be underestimated or understated how ho...

Florida woman to face charges in Peninsula death of Kardashian lookalike model after hotel-room cosmetic procedure

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:37 GMT

The April death of a social-media model will result in felony charges for the woman who performed a cosmetic operation in a Burlingame hotel room,  leading to the victim’s death, according to San Mateo District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe.Christina Ashten Gourkani, 34, died around April 20 due to complications from a cosmetic procedure, according to her website. Gourkani, who described herself as a “big fan” of socialite Kim Kardashian in an online profile, had a significant social-media following for her Kardashian-like looks and exaggerated physique, which garnered nearly 140,000 Instagram and more than 200,000 Twitter followers.According to an online fundraiser, which raised about $6,600 to pay medical and funeral expenses, Gourkani suffered cardiac arrest following the procedure.Royal Palm Beach, Fla. resident Vivian Gomez will face felony charges including involuntary manslaughter and practicing medicine without certification, according to a complaint filed on ...

Would new Oakland A’s ballpark lead to more spending? John Fisher’s other team shows that may not be the case

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:37 GMT

As the Oakland A’s have pursued a ballpark over the last two decades, team ownership’s common refrain has boiled down to this:If we can build a new stadium, the spending on the team will come.But team owner John Fisher’s other major professional sports team, the San Jose Earthquakes, continues to show why that might not be the case.The Major League Soccer Players Association released salary information for the 2023 season on Tuesday, and the data shows that the Earthquakes still rank in the bottom third in spending across the MLS.Out of the 29 MLS teams, the Earthquakes rank 21st in guaranteed player compensation and base salary, both on a per-player and teamwide basis.The Earthquakes’ average salary came in at $434,079, nearly $100,000 lower than the overall average salary for an MLS player ($530,467). San Jose’s total spending ($13.022 million) comes in at more than $2.8 million below the average team spending across the league (15.822 million).It’s a continued trend for the...

TikTok content moderators force-fed gruesome videos allowed to sue

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:37 GMT

If a science fiction writer were to devise a digital age torture, it might be the one that Reece Young and Ashley Velez experienced in their work for TikTok and for which they seek class action relief. Young and Velez prevailed Monday on the first leg of their quest to hold TikTok Inc. and its Mountain View parent company Bytedance Inc. accountable for allegedly failing to protect them from the psychological injuries they suffered from "moderating" gruesome content on the TikTok platform. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged facts that, if proven to be true, would be sufficient to hold defendants liable for the injuries plaintiffs suffered, even though Young and Velez were "contracted employees," not directly employed by the platform companies. Elon Musk blames ‘woke mind virus’ for downtown San Francisco’s woes TikTok operates a social media platform on which users post, view and share short videos. The platform is massive. ...

Convicted San Franciscans can achieve 'clean slate' under new law

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:37 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) -- San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju is encouraging an estimated 25,000 San Franciscans to permanently expunge or seal their old conviction records under a new state law that went into effect this year. The "groundbreaking" law made California the first state America's history to allow most old convictions on a person’s criminal record to be permanently expunged, the San Francisco Public Defender's Office stated. SB 731 was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom last October.SB 731 gives people who have already paid their debt to society the opportunity to reenter into their communities with a clean slate. The law dramatically expanded the list of convictions that are eligible for expungement. It also created a legal process allowing people to expunge old conviction and arrest records once a person has fully completed their sentence, and successfully gone four years without further contact with the justice system. "SB 731 is a powerful new tool that organiza...

Republicans Step in to Fund PAC Attacking Philadelphia Mayoral Candidate Helen Gym

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:37 GMT

Registered Republicans have stepped in to fund a little-known political action committee that has run ads attacking the leading progressive candidate in Philadelphia’s mayoral election, recent campaign disclosures show.Since late April, the Coalition for Safety and Equitable Growth has run ads targeting former Philadelphia City Council member Helen Gym. Gym is one of five major candidates in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for Philadelphia mayor. The winner will advance to the general election in November and is expected to win in the overwhelmingly blue city.Gym’s campaign has long suspected that the committee was funded by Republican megadonor Jeffrey Yass, but Yass’s involvement was not confirmed until the group had to file a campaign finance report on May 5. Yass, a registered Libertarian, has so far contributed $1.1 million to the effort, records show. The Coalition for Safety and Equitable Growth was one of the first outside groups to run negative ads during the mayoral primary.&...

Judge bristles at cheater talk after taking sideways glance before big home run

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:37 GMT

TORONTO (AP) — New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge doesn’t appreciate being branded a potential cheater after he took a sideways peek before hitting a 462-foot home run in Toronto.“I’ve got some choice words about that, but I’m just going to keep that off the record,” Judge said before Tuesday night’s game.Across the diamond, Blue Jays manager John Schneider said his team spoke to Major League Baseball about the positioning of New York’s base coaches.“There’s boxes on the field for a reason,’ Schneider said.The commissioner’s office said it was aware of Monday’s situation and will be paying attention to it, Toronto’s second-year manager said.Yankees manager Aaron Boone said his team also had been in touch with MLB.“Our understanding is that there will not be any kind of investigation because nothing that went on last night was against the rules,” Boone said.Houston was penalized for using prohibited electronics to steal signs en route to the 2017 World Series title. There is ...

North Carolina GOP takes first step to override veto of 12-week abortion limit

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:37 GMT

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate voted Tuesday to override the Democratic governor’s veto of a bill banning most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy in the first of two steps necessary to enact the policy over Gov. Roy Cooper’s opposition.The vote came as abortion rights in the U.S. faced another tectonic shift with lawmakers debating laws to sharply limit abortion in North and South Carolina, two of the few remaining Southern states with relatively easy access.Nebraska joined North Carolina and South Carolina in debating abortion restrictions Tuesday that are possible because the U.S. Supreme Court last year struck down the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which established a nationwide right to abortion.Under another bill up for a vote Tuesday, in the South Carolina House, abortion access would be almost entirely banned after about six weeks of pregnancy. The South Carolina state Senate rejected a proposal to nearly outlaw abortions.Abortion is...

Judge: Tennessee lawmaker can’t withdraw guilty plea on campaign finance charges

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:54:37 GMT

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday declined to let a former Tennessee state senator withdraw his guilty plea on federal campaign finance charges. In the case related to his failed 2016 congressional campaign, former Republican Sen. Brian Kelsey’s attorneys had argued he should be allowed to go back on his guilty plea because he entered it in November with an “unsure heart and a confused mind” due to events in his personal life — his father had terminal pancreatic cancer, then later died in February, and he and his wife were caring for their twin sons born in September.U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Nashville said that those stressors are not sufficient to allow the reversal of his guilty plea. Kelsey’s sentencing was set for late July. “A guilty plea is a grave and solemn act,” Crenshaw said, according to The Daily Memphian.Kelsey and his mother were among those who testified at the hearing Tuesday.Kelsey pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud t...