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Top Stories: June 8, 2010

Election Day in Santa Clara County; More Medical Marijuana Mayhem; Death Penalty Trial in San Jose

by Danny Wool on Jun 08, 2010
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More Corporate, Less Cargo
In its quest for a survival strategy, Mineta Airport wants to increase its profile for corporate fliers, even if this comes at the expense of Fedex and UPS. When it meets today, City Council will be asked to decide whether it agrees that the airport should shift its focus, reducing the number of cargo flights, and increasing corporate flights for executives in and around Silicon Valley.

Airport Spokesman David Vossbrink says that this will bring in more money, which can then be split between the airport and the city. It will also reduce noise, he says, because corporate jets are smaller and quieter than the bulky cargo planes. On the other hand, corporate jets do not keep to a predetermined schedule, and there are likely to be more flights coming and going past the airport's current curfew. Quieter planes, but more of them, all around the clock. Now it's up to City Council to decide what it prefers.
Read More at KCBS.


Preschools and Purple Haze
As California inches toward the legalization of marijuana, City Council is being forced to consider how it would regulate the mushrooming number of pot clubs in the city - 70 at last count. At issue is the Purple People dispensary on De Anza Boulevard, operated by Andrew Runner. Two doors down is the Alphabet Soup Preschool, a veritable institution, that has been there since before Runner was born. The times have certainly changed.

Sue Campbell, who heads Alphabet Soup, was named Teacher of the Year in 2006. Now, however, she is worried that Purple People is going to put her out of business.

So far, City Council has done little to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries. City Councilmember Pierluigi Oliverio did draft proposed regulations last autumn, but it took until March for the city to act upon it. Now the situation is getting more desperate, as more and more dispensaries open up. "As Councilmember Sam Liccardo says, "If we don't severely restrict where and how medicinal marijuana is distributed in the city, we're going to see several decades of effort to preserve the quality of life in our neighborhoods go up in smoke."

Suggestions being touted by the city include limiting the number of dispensaries to ten and limiting them to industrial areas. Of course, not everyone agrees. The dispensaries do bring in a considerable amount of revenue in sales tax, and the city is strapped for cash. Some buyers do not like the idea of being forced to go to an industrial zone to make their purchases, while the owners of the dispensaries claim that they are perfectly safe. Apart from describing the security measures he takes, Runner says, "There are children present, sure, but there's no smoking or ingesting medication here on the premises, so there's no effect on the kids."

But that hardly brings any relief to the parents of children at Alphabet Soup, or to the parents who refuse to send their kids their now. One parent says that he still fears his children "will be exposed to drug-related crime right next to the school."

What seems certain is that the city will have to step in so that neither side loses out. And, as Oliverio says, "So far San Jose has done nothing."
Read More at ABC 7.
Read More at The Mercury News.

Death Penalty Case a First for San Jose
Anh Thay Duong, 35, has gone on trial in federal court in San Jose for a series of murders that took place in the city and surrounding areas in the late 1990s. He has already been sentenced to death in Southern California for a series of killings that took place there. Duong was described as the "linchpin" in a major criminal organization by Prosecutor Shawna Yen. She is seeking the death penalty. Duong's attorneys are investigating the possibility of a mental illness defense, arguing that their client attempted to kill himself when he stood trial in 2001.

This is the first federal trial in San Jose and only the second in the Bay Area where the death penalty is being sought in over 50 years. Last year, a federal judge in San Francisco eventually rejected the death penalty and sentenced a gang leader to life in prison.
Read More at KLIV.
Read More at The Mercury News.

A Whole Continent Is Mad at Google
Sure, Germany and France and a few other European states are upset with Google over its Wi-Fi sweeps that collected random data from random passersby—or rather, random places that it happened to pass by. But they are not the only ones. Now Australia is upset as well, and that's not just a country. It's a continent. A small continent no doubt, with fewer people than California and only one country on it, but a continent nonetheless. On Monday, Australia announced that it has launched a police investigation to determine whether Google violated the country's privacy laws.

They are being joined by the state of Connecticut, where Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has said that Google's practices could have violated privacy laws there as well. Of course, Blumenthal is also running for Senator Chris Dodd's seat in November and has faced a few little scandals of his own, not least concerning his claims that he served in Vietnam. Could he be trying to deflect attention from that?

Possibly, but Blumenthal does have a history of taking high tech giants to court when he feels they overreached their bounds. In 1998, he sued Microsoft for antitrust violations over their Windows 98 operating system. He lost, but today Google is an even bigger fish for an Attorney General who needs some positive press.
Read More at the Business Journal.

Guess Who's Coming to Gilroy
Deep in Gilroy, in wild Gilroy, the lion roams tonight….

It's the perfect song for the town, where a mountain lion was spotted roaming the streets. Perhaps it had a taste for garlic, though most people were worried that it had a taste for school children instead. The 80-pound young cat was last seen by police on Tatum Avenue on Monday morning, and police fired pepper pellets at it to encourage it to hunt elsewhere. Meanwhile the school district has issued a warning, encouraging parents to keep an eye on their children and watch out for predators, especially of the feline variety.
Read More at KSBW.

Election Day
It's Election Day today, and across the state people are watching to see if Meg Whitman's millions and Carly Fiorina's Mart Krofft-inspired ad campaign pay off. But there are other big issues at stake locally, like the Santa Clara stadium for the 49ers, the four-way struggle over District 5, or perhaps the most melodramatic vote of all, District Attorney Dolores Carr v. Jeff Rosen, her deputy.

Then there are the campaigns that no one really cares about, like the primaries in the Peace and Freedom Party, which attracted three candidates, or the various other candidates, Republican and Democrat, who are contesting the bigger races (to be fair, Peter Schurman pulled out and is endorsing Jerry Brown). Here come their 15 minutes of fame.

Good luck to all the candidates, and remember, in a place like California, sometimes the biggest winner ends up the biggest loser. We'll be here with the results tomorrow.



by Danny Wool on Jun 08, 2010
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