Results tagged “kqed”

There's a staff editorial in this week's SFBG discussing the decline of the Chronicle and a new KQED/Warren Hellman-led non-profit venture to create a new online news source for San Francisco. The Guardian takes a few moments to get in some digs at the Chron -- in particular at such conservative columnists as C.W. Nevius who we'd probably agree seems to "disdain everything about San Francisco and urban life in general" -- and they assert, "It's little wonder then that a significant percentage of San Franciscans (in particular, younger people) see no reason whatsoever to pick up the San Francisco Chronicle."

The East Bay is home to over 40,000 Afghan-Americans, and the big news back home in Afghanistan over the past two days has been the country's second national election since the end of Taliban rule in 2001. A lower turnout was reported than in the last election, largely due to threats of Taliban attacks on polling station and general apathy about the political situation in the country.

You've probably heard that some California counties are fuming over the new state budget, which borrows $4 billion from county budgets and will mean major cuts in local services from health care to public works. Rich Gordon of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors says this budget will, once put in practice, "fall apart."

One of San Francisco's favorite writers in residence, Dave Eggers, was on KQED's "Forum" this morning discussing his new book Zeitoun. It's a non-fiction work, just out from McSweeney's press as of last week, about a Syrian-American man named Abdulrahman Zeitoun who stuck around with his American wife and children in his adopted hometown of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina only to be abruptly made to disappear by the U.S. government.

KQED today brings us this report about a move in the California Assembly to ban Bisphenol-A, a.k.a. BPA, a widely used chemical in plastic packaging. It's been known to be potentially hazardous since the 1930s, and lots of scientists think it's probably the reason why everyone gets cancer these days, but a large enough study in humans has yet to be done. The proposed ban would only affect plastics in baby bottles and baby foods, and Connecticut and Minnesota have already passed similar bans. Di Fi is proposing a nationwide ban in the Senate that would affect all food products. In the radio piece below, Sarah Varney speaks with a California Pacific Medical Center researcher who's been injecting the stuff into human cells and who consequently probably only shops at the farmer's market.

KQED offers up this report, embedded below, about the National Conference on Volunteering and Service currently happening at the Moscone Center. The conference almost got canceled, due to the slashing of non-profit budgets across the country, but because of the "compassion boom" described by the spokeswoman here, Nicola Goren, and the push for volunteerism by the Obama White House. So far there's been a good turn out, with over 5,000 attendees the first day. So, if you happen to be funemployed, consider donating some of your otherwise misspent time to a good cause, huh?

Everyone loves chocolate -- especially "bitches," as a female friend loves to remind us whenever we reach for a Snickers. From Willy Wonka to Kylie Minogue, people love shoveling it into their greedy, sugar starved mouths.

Five Stanford doctoral students are flying to Paris this weekend as finalists in a competition sponsored by Airbus for the best fuel-saving idea for commercial airlines. Their idea is for the passenger jets to fly in formation the way military airplanes and birds do -- something that engineers have known for decades allows for a reduce in drag. They figure that the planes don't even have to leave from the same airports or go to the same destination to take advantage of the idea. Three planes crossing the Atlantic to Europe would just need to time their rendezvous points off the east coast, join formation for the transatlantic trip, and break the formation after they cross the pond. Good luck choreographing that ballet!