Newsroom

By Donna Beth Weilenman

U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa, has joined three other California members of Congress in asking Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx to make crude shipments by rail safer.

Thompson, Benicia's member of the House, as well as Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, George Miller, D-Martinez, and John Garamendi, D-Fairfield, have written Foxx, asking him to issue regulations and speed up rules that would prevent future accidents during crude delivery by rail.

It's been a long road, but the anticipated opening of Sonoma Valley Community Health Center's new facility is now just three weeks away.

"It's absolutely gorgeous," said Health Center CEO Cheryl Johnson of the newly-renovated structure, located at 19270 Highway 12, across from Maxwell Village Shopping Center. Johnson said the 18,000-square-foot facility is slated to open July 22, though there is still much to be done.

Deadly mass shootings occur with such alarming regularity that the public can be forgiven for believing there's no way to prevent them.

But lawmakers and experts concerned with the connections between mental illness and violence insist that solutions exist.

And, they say, many of them can be found in California, where laws on the books are credited with reducing the gun death rate 56 percent in the past two decades, according to data compiled by San Francisco's Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

A decade and a half after a husband and wife donated 642 acres of rangeland to American Canyon, the Newell Open Space Preserve at last lived up to its name, officially opening to the public Saturday.

Long an expansive but inaccessible backdrop to a growing city, the tawny, grassy hills and oak groves of American Canyon's northeast corner finally became public space in a dedication ceremony attended by about 80 spectators, many of them equipped with boots, sun hats and water flasks to hike the preserve's 2.6-mile uphill trail on a sun-drenched morning.

In the wake of recent shootings in Portland, Ore., Las Vegas, Nev. and Santa Barbara, Congress members Carol Shea-Porter (D-New Hampshire), a member of the House's Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, and Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena), the task force's chairman, led a letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) signed by 163 members of Congress demanding a vote on substantive legislation to address gun violence.