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BART's top-paid worker of 2012 never worked a day With a gross salary of more than $333,000, BART's highest-paid employee last year wasn't its general manager, police chief or a worker who racked up gobs of overtime scrubbing grime from filthy train seats. It was someone who did no work at all for BART in 2012: Dorothy Dugger, the agency's former general manager who resigned under pressure more than two years ago. Under a lucrative retirement scheme, Dugger, 57, quietly stayed on the books, burning off nearly 80 weeks of unused vacation time, drawing paychecks and full benefits for more...

Just when Californians are finally feeling upbeat again about where the state is heading, here comes a fresh downer: The federal sequester cuts set to kick in this week could cost California billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs while making most of our daily lives more difficult. The state's budget may be balanced and the economy improving, but unless congressional Republicans and President Barack Obama reach a last-minute deal, the federal government on Friday will begin slashing $85 billion this year, including about 8 percent from the Pentagon and about 5 percent from most other discretionary programs....

Jodi Hernandez reports on the cosmic close encounter that the earth is experiencing tonight and the real one Russia experienced this morning. On a day that had a lot of people talking about meteorites and asteroids, a fireball of some sort was seen streaking across the Bay Area skies. The fireball was seen around 7:45 p.m. There are reports into the newsroom from people as far north as Fairfield and as far south as Gilroy. It was also seen in Sacramento, Newark, Walnut Creek, and St. Helena. It was bluish in color and appeared to be heading straight to the...

SAN MATEO (CBSLA.com) — A Mojave Desert memorial dedicated to fallen U.S. soldiers that was stolen two years ago has resurfaced in Northern California. KNX 1070′s Jan Stevens reports the controversial cross had been standing in the Mojave National Preserve in San Bernardino County since 1934 before it was discovered missing in 2010. Lt. Larry Schumaker with San Mateo Sheriff’s said the 7-foot-high cross was found zip-tied to a fence post near a highway in Half Moon Bay. “It had some significant scratches so we confirmed it’s the cross that belongs there,” said Schumaker. A letter taped to the cross...

They began as tools in military combat. Now aerial drones are being considered by Bay Area law enforcement agencies as a cost-cutting way to replace helicopters, and use technology to fight crime and save lives. Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern first tested one of these Unmanned Aerial Systems or UAS about a year ago. Now he’s looking into possibly bringing a drone here. His office would be the first in California to do it. Armed with live-video-feeding capabilities and different features, like infrared devices, these drones can cost in the ballpark of 50- to 100-thousand dollars or more. There are...

Pete Stark's days in Congress might be numbered The nearly four-decade reign of Rep. Pete Stark, D-Fremont, is about to end. Stark finished first among three candidates in the 15th Congressional District, but the message of discontent with his boorish and increasingly erratic approach to his job as a public servant could not have been louder. Nearly 59 percent of voters in the freshly realigned district preferred someone other than Stark: 36 percent for Eric Swalwell, a 31-year-old prosecutor and Dublin City Council member, and 22 percent for Chris Pareja, an independent who ran a spirited low-budget campaign. In years...

Woman won online essay contest and popular voteA Bay Area woman has just claimed an award even she didn't expect: Extreme Huntress of 2012. Think of it as the "Miss America" of the hunting community. It's a big deal. Concord resident Tiffany Brewer recently won the nationwide contest, sponsored by Tahoe Films and Tom Opre, host of the NBC Sports outdoors show "Eye of the Hunter." Entrants had to submit a 500-word essay on why they considered themselves the Extreme Huntress. Ten finalists were chosen based on their essays, then it was up to popular online vote to determine the...

Vandals desecrated a Catholic church, destroying a cross, defacing statues and spray-painting graffiti with satanic symbols -- acts discovered on Ash Wednesday that police have classified as a hate crime. The vandalism was discovered at St. Anne Catholic Church around 7 a.m., about an hour before services were scheduled for the first day of Lent, a 40-day season of fasting and prayer before the Easter holiday. "This is terrible and very disturbing," said the Rev. Geoffrey Baraan, the church's pastor for the past six years. "I'm still shaking with fear and wonder and disbelief." Peter Petit, a longtime parishioner, discovered...

Early risers Saturday will see a total eclipse of the moon low in the western sky, and if the Bay Area's clear weather persists, the sight should be spectacular. "The full moon should appear even larger than normal when the eclipse is total because it will be so low in the sky that Earth's atmosphere will magnify it into a blood-red monster," said astronomer Andrew Fraknoi of Foothill College in Los Alto Hills. The partial eclipse will begin at 4:45 a.m. and will become total at 6:05 a.m., Fraknoi said. Totality will last until 6:57 a.m.

When President Obama announced his $4 billion initiative to finance energy efficiency programs at the White House on Friday, a number of Bay Area allies were, literally, right behind him. There were senior executives from San Francisco's Metrus Energy, which committed $75 million of private capital to the initiative, and from Sunnyvale's Serious Energy and Santa Rosa's Ygrene Energy Fund, both contributing $100 million. They're among the 60 private companies and other entities "stepping up," in Obama's words, in an effort to retrofit public and commercial buildings nationwide, pitching in approximately half of the $4 billion needed. The rest of...

Gusts up to 70 mph Wednesday are forecast for the Bay Area in "a potentially damaging and prolonged wind storm," the National Weather Service. The high-wind warning issued by the weather agency says the strongest winds will be in the hills above 1,000 feet; sustained winds of 20 to 40 mph with frequent gusts over 50 mph are expected through most of the Bay Area. The warning is in effect from 6 a.m. Wednesday to 6 a.m. Thursday. Even fiercer winds are expected in Southern California, with northeast gusts to 80 mph in the mountain passes. Weather service forecasters are...

Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, an Alameda County judge since 2008, was confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday for the U.S. District Court in Oakland, where she will become the first Latina federal judge in the Bay Area. The Senate voted 89-6 to approve President Obama's nomination of Gonzalez Rogers to fill the vacancy created by U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's retirement in February. There was no debate, and the opponents, all Republicans, did not say why they voted against the nominee, who had not drawn any opposition in her committee hearing. Gonzalez Rogers, 46, a Texas native and Princeton honors graduate,...

Communist/Anarchist OWS Demonstrators have been taunting the local police for HOURS on end to provoke them into a fight, and now the police in Oakland, with support by many other local agencies, appear to have had just about enough and appear ready to restore order to the streets of the city.Live Leftist Link Here6:00 a.m. Pacific/9:00 a.m. Eastern.

OAKLAND -- The Bay Area has fewer concentrations of extreme poverty than a decade ago, according to a report released Thursday. That may not console the people living in the Bay Area's five poorest neighborhoods. In five census tracts, four of them in the East Bay, more than 40 percent of residents live below the poverty line, according to the Brookings Institution report. The neighborhoods are in downtown Berkeley, uptown Oakland, Alameda Point and parts of West Oakland and San Francisco's Hunters Point. Two are business districts where many homeless congregate; one, the area around Oakland's Frank H. Ogawa Plaza,...

A paratransit bus driver intentionally rammed a Hells Angels biker on Interstate 580, and then dragged him about a mile, killing him, a CHP spokesman said. The biker, who has not been identified, was traveling eastbound on I-580 in San Leandro near Grand Avenue with a small group of Hells Angels members before 4 p.m. when an altercation began, said CHP Sgt. Trent Cross. After being hit, the motorcyclist and his bike were dragged for about a mile, said San Leandro police Lt. Greg Lemmon. Eventually, the biker was released from under the East Bay Paratransit bus, but the driver...

SAN FRANCISCO -- An estimated half-million illegal immigrants live in the Bay Area, according to a study that is one of the first to try to measure the number of local residents living in the U.S. illegally. The report by the Public Policy Institute of California used tax returns, previous national estimates and mathematical models to determine that 563,000 illegal immigrants live in the Bay Area, about 8 percent of the region's total population. Santa Clara County leads the Bay Area with 180,000 illegal immigrants, followed by Alameda County with 124,000 and Contra Costa County with 79,000, the study found....

The Fourth of July sky will be a little darker this year as lean economic times force cities across the Bay Area to snuff out a favorite all-American tradition: fireworks shows. In past years, the East Bay shoreline was ablaze with exploding, booming, multicolored pyrotechnics on Independence Day. But this year only Berkeley and San Pablo will light up their waterfronts with fireworks. The others are too far in the red for the red, white and blue. Livermore and Hercules dropped their fireworks and parades this year. Oakland and San Leandro canceled their fireworks a year or two ago. Other...

RENO, Nev. (CBS/AP) — Authorities plan to look into the driving and medical records of the semitrailer driver who died when the truck slammed into an Amtrak train, killing a train crew member and injuring dozens of passengers. Peter Knudson, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said they also will look at autopsy results to determine whether the driver had consumed any drugs around the time of the collision Friday. The big rig plowed into the California-bound train at a crossing in a rural area about 70 miles east of Reno. Knudson said federal investigators would make sure...

President Barack Obama will visit the Bay Area Thursday to meet with high tech business leaders -- a session that will stress jobs, innovation, green tech and education themes, White House sources tell the Chronicle. So far, no information on where the meeting will be held -- or whether any part of it will be public -- but here's what we know from a White House official: the session is "a part of our ongoing dialogue with the business community on how we can work together to win the future, strengthen our economy, support entrepreneurship, and get the American people...

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS/AP) – Bay Area residents are hoping for a warmer weekend after a Thanksgiving cold snap broke or tied cold-temperature records — some more than a century old — up and down the state. The National Weather Service reports that San Francisco’s low of 42 degrees on Thursday tied a record set back in 1892. Across the bay in Oakland, 36-degree daytime temperatures shattered the old record of 42. The mercury in Los Angeles dropped to 42, tying a 1946 record.