July 20, 2012  |   For the past few years, activists of various stripes -- environmentalists, liberals, some tea party folks, and others -- have been protesting the installation of smart meters in Northern California and elsewhere. The meters send a wireless radio signal to...

July 16, 2012  |   Community activists attend a San Francisco fundraiser in June, raising money for one of the city's two major gay and lesbian Democratic clubs. Photo courtesy Reese Aaron Isbell. More than 30 years ago -- June of 1982 to be...

June 14, 2012  |   Bobbi Campbell, Photo courtesy of ITVS. I've been working on a story that brings back lots of memories and thoughts about a tough subject. It's a story about a documentary that PBS stations will air this week remembering the...

May 23, 2012  |   I've been driving over the Golden Gate Bridge all my life and nearly every day for the past 40 years. Often, the drive is exhilarating, especially when there are boats in San Francisco Bay. Sometimes, particularly on foggy mornings, it's...

May 7, 2012  |   An edible waterbug. Photo by Sevda Eris / KQED When I told my wife and family that I was going to be eating insects as part of a story I was preparing for the PBS NewsHour, the universal response...

April 10, 2012  |   Students protest outside a Board of Trustees meeting at Santa Monica College on April 3. Police drew batons and reacted using pepper spray on a crowd as students gathered outside the meeting protesting the Board's decision to raise fees...

April 4, 2012  |   What's as easy as lighting up a room -- say a hospital delivery room? You'd be surprised. In much of Africa and other poor areas, electricity is scarce and unreliable. Hospitals and clinics in developing countries...

March 21, 2012  |   San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi speaks at his swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 8. Photo by Steve Rhodes via Flickr. While the rest of the nation concentrates on the GOP presidential primary and the shootings in Afghanistan and Florida, San...

March 16, 2012  |   Stockton, Calif., has been plagued with financial woes since the housing crisis began. Updated 12 p.m. ET March 19 Poor Stockton. Last year*, Forbes Magazine named the California town the most miserable city in the U.S. And now Stockton...

March 1, 2012  |   There's a big battle going on throughout the country, but especially in California, over whether to build very expensive high-speed rail systems. In these tough economic times, when the federal and the state governments don't have enough money to...

February 27, 2012  |   A music therapist at the University of California, San Francisco uses a drum circle to connect with pediatric patients. The interesting thing about music therapy is that nobody I could find understands how it works...

December 29, 2011  |   One of the toughest jobs in modern America has got to be running an urban school district. Superintendents of schools in big cities like Washington, D.C, Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif., don't have very good job security because if...

December 6, 2011  |   Even though there don't seem to be any major statewide election contests on the horizon, political winds are swirling in California, kicking up dust. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein is up for re-election next year, but so far nobody well-known is...

November 17, 2011  |   Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images. This post has been updated. Somewhat lost in the war of words over health care reform is a stepchild of the debate: dental care. A bad situation is getting worse. Teeth are crucial. When...

November 1, 2011  |   Photo by Flicker user Wendy McCormac. You would think the state is actually broken. And maybe it is. But Silicon Valley seems to be doing well, housing prices in San Francisco remain high, fancy restaurants are packed and tickets...

July 28, 2011  |   Photo by Flickr user net_efekt Bees, for some reason, seem to fascinate us. Perhaps it's their social structure: the queen, the workers, the drones, producing honey and baby bees and living their short lives in a super-organized way that...

July 13, 2011  |   California Men's Colony; Creative Commons photo courtesy flickr.com/javan Prisoners probably pay more attention to the news - at least some of the news -than many of the rest of us. They have a lot of time on their hands....

June 23, 2011  |   California's Legislature is terribly unpopular. In March, just 16 percent of the public approved of the job the lawmakers were doing. So there was a collective cheer you could almost hear from San Diego to Eureka when the state...

April 25, 2011  |   Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets practice battlefield tactics in Princeton, N.J. You wouldn't necessarily know it walking around campus, but there's a major debate going on at Stanford University, and at a few...

March 25, 2011  |   There's a panic button included in a software program provided by a Palo Alto, Calif.-based nonprofit called Benetech. The program itself is designed to safely store data about torture, murder, killings and other human rights abuses in countries around the...

March 24, 2011  |   This aerial image shows tsunami tidal waves moving upstream in the Naka River in Ibaraki prefecture on March 11; STR/AFP/Getty Images As horrific as the March 11 earthquake and tsunami were in Japan, they were exciting events for geologists...

February 18, 2011  |   President Barack Obama talks with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg; White House photo by Pete Souza The splashy news out of President Obama's trip to the high-tech haunts in the West is that the CEO of Facebook, Mark...

February 9, 2011  |   A decision made by California voters six years ago may well have a bearing on the mental health issues raised by the shooting spree in Tucson, Ariz. Californians decided in 2004 to impose an extra 1 percent income tax for...

February 1, 2011  |   Jerry Brown -- California's new Democratic governor -- is getting away with something that most politicians these days can only dream about. He has plunged into California's huge budgetary mess -- the state is short $25.4 billion -- proposing...

January 10, 2011  |   While the nation was transfixed by the tragedy in Tucson, California's new governor, Jerry Brown, announced Monday a plan that could dramatically alter the state's welfare, health care, education and other programs. In office only a week, Brown announced...

January 3, 2011  |   Jerry Brown wasn't movie-star smooth at his inaugural ceremony Monday. His head bobbed up and down as he read from a script without a teleprompter. But there was something real about him, which is probably part of the reason...

December 28, 2010  |   While some parts of the nation are figuring out how to block national health care reform or repeal the law, California has plunged headfirst into making it work. The Republican governor and the Democratic legislature are cooperating to smooth the...

October 28, 2010  |   Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum takes the mound for Game 1 of the World Series in San Francisco. Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images. The San Francisco Giants beat the Texas Rangers, 11-7, in Game 1 of the World Series Wednesday...

October 27, 2010  |   From France to San Francisco, pension reform is hot. What once was an arcane, wonky topic has become a political and social flashpoint in elections and - as in France - in the streets. Across the nation, 19 million...

October 8, 2010  |   In the troubled and debt-ridden state of California, two strong, well-known candidates are vying for the dubious honor of becoming the next governor. But something is missing in this extremely political year. Republican Meg Whitman, the former head of eBay,...

September 2, 2010  |   There's a fight brewing on an issue that seemed settled in 2006. That was when California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, flexing his environmental credentials, signed into law a measure that requires a statewide cut in greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels...

August 27, 2010  |   It's very hard for me to separate my own experiences in the aftermath of Katrina from the flood of other impressions I've wallowed in since 2005. I've watched HBO's "Treme" and Spike Lee's "If God is Willing and Da Creek...

August 18, 2010  |   In a recent NewsHour report on cybersecurity, we showed security expert Chris Paget, shown above, climbing on a 29th floor hotel balcony in Las Vegas to demonstrate how he could read radio frequency identification tags at "long distances." The...

August 10, 2010  |   More than 15,000 computer nerds - hackers, government officials, security company officials and who knows who else - spent a few days in Las Vegas recently for an unusual set of conventions. The subject on everyone's minds was cyber attacks...

July 22, 2010  |   New Orleans fishing guide Ryan Lambert There is a charm about New Orleans; a feeling and a culture that is unique. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and now the big oil spill, there...

July 7, 2010  |   Mark Twain had a lot to say, and most of it was funny. Reading his novels and essays, it doesn't seem like he pulled his punches; he said what he wanted, and a lot of it was pretty radical for...

June 9, 2010  |   The biggest question about California's primary election remains unanswered. What is the strength of the Republican right wing, the tea partiers? That question will ultimately have to wait until the general election in November -- and even then the...

June 9, 2010  |   Updated 5:20pm ET BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles issued this letter on media access Wednesday. In the statement, Suttles says "BP fully supports and defends all individuals rights to share their personal thoughts and experiences with journalists if...

May 21, 2010  |   With Republicans and the tea partiers getting most of the headlines these days, it's a little surprising that liberal Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California has opened up a small but significant lead over all the Republicans running against...

April 30, 2010  |   <!-- _pap_embeddable; //--><!]]> One of the things U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln told me that irks her the most about Washington is the fact that she can't get a direct, non-stop flight from the capital to Little Rock. She's the...

April 5, 2010  |   SAN FRANCISCO | Silicon Valley is looking deeply inward and finding things are not as they were. The valley, where firms like Google, Apple, Intel and Applied Materials have their headquarters, is losing steam and perhaps the innovative spirit that...

March 23, 2010  |   Updated 8:12pm ET California Sen. Barbara Boxer appears to be in political trouble, but as she always reminds audiences and interviewers, she's been in trouble before, and has always emerged a winner. I remember her running for supervisor in Marin...

March 4, 2010  |   Jerry Brown finally said out loud what everybody else in California had been saying for months: he is officially a candidate -- in fact the only candidate - for the Democratic nomination for governor. At 71, Brown starts from...

February 26, 2010  |   With California hurting across the board, a host of thinkers, academics, business groups and journalists had some big ideas on how to fix the state government's myriad problems. They wanted to make basic changes to the constitution, not just the...

February 22, 2010  |   A 33-year-old math and science whiz kid -- working out of his house in California's Silicon Valley -- may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago...

January 6, 2010  |   Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor-turned-lawmaker who rode into office waving a broom with which to sweep California's capital clean, tried to salvage a troubled financial situation in his final State of the State address on Wednesday. Facing a $20 billion...

December 30, 2009  |   The Google books story sounds pretty simple on the surface: Google wants to digitize or scan a large portion of the world's books, and then make them available for people searching a subject. That part is fairly straight forward. After...