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“Whumph!” It sounds like somebody just dropped a sack of potatoes from 50 feet high into 3 feet of powder snow. On instinct, you will turn to see where it came from. There are no indicators: A moonscape of fresh snow extends as far as you can see up the steep mountain slopes. If you’re not scared by now, then you don’t realize the risk: The daunting power of nature may be about to unleash its ultimate winter force, an avalanche. The “whumph” noise is a warning sound that an avalanche may be imminent. It occurs when a deep layer...

Arturo Hurtado of Richmond was still stricken with grief over the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 schoolchildren dead when he awoke Saturday morning. So he decided to get rid of his gun - "that darn thing," he called it - and purged it from his home. "I've got kids, man," said Hurtado, who works at Waste Management in Oakland and has children ages 14, 10, 6 and 1. "Kids are curious. Kids don't know any better. I had it locked in a toolbox, so I don't know. ... I just know it had to go." Hurtado was...

A little more than a year ago, Prashant Singh was an engineer at Microsoft's Mountain View campus working on projects including Internet-connected televisions and the Xbox. But for the past year, his career has taken a civil service turn. The 31-year-old engineer spent 2012 designing a public transit tool and other technology for the city of Detroit. Through the San Francisco nonprofit Code for America, Singh took a sabbatical of sorts. As fellows of the effort nicknamed the "Peace Corps for geeks," Singh and 25 other techies fanned out for a year across the United States to help municipalities develop...

California students who fail algebra and repeat the course are pretty much doomed to fail again, a vicious cycle that wastes limited resources and precious learning time, according to a report released Friday. Just over a third of students in the 24 school districts studied had to repeat Algebra I either in ninth or 10th grade, yet even after a second year of study, relatively few were proficient in the subject. Of those who took the class in eighth grade and repeated it as freshmen, just 1 in 5 scored at a proficient level on standardized tests. And of those...

When Thanksgiving Day parade-goers in Manhattan looked into the confetti-filled sky last week, they may have seen more than they bargained for. Nassau County police announced that they are investigating how some of their confidential records including social security numbers and even details about a motorcade for Mitt Romney, then the GOP presidential candidate, ended up as joyous scraps raining from buildings on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. “I'm just completely in shock. How could someone have this kind of information, and how could it be distributed at the Thanksgiving Day Parade?” Inspector Kenneth Lack, from the Nassau County Police...

When it comes to attracting business to California's eastern deserts, Inyo County is none too choosy. Since the 19th century the sparsely populated county has worked to attract industries shunned by others, including gold, tungsten and salt mining. The message: Your business may be messy, but if you plan to hire our residents, the welcome mat is out. So the county grew giddy last year as it began to consider hosting a huge, clean industry. BrightSource Energy, developer of the proposed $2.7-billion Hidden Hills solar power plant 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles, promised a bounty of jobs and a...

News that a small Montana newspaper inserted the word “allegedly” in the midst of an AP news story -- so that it read “Obama was allegedly born in Hawaii” -- caused a small furor Tuesday. But how should we read this latest commentary on the president’s birthright? A) Proof that racism runs rampant in American society. B) Evidence that "birthers" have infiltrated the ranks of the mainstream media. C) An instance of precision from journalists, most of whom have been too willing to accept flimsy proof of President Obama’s birthplace. D) As a window into how bored journalists amuse themselves...

<p>Hackers have discovered a new way to part computer uses with their money. They plant malware on a computer that threatens to report the computer user to the police for viewing or distributing porn.</p> <p>It's a form of hacking called "ransomware," according to a new report by security company Symantec, which estimates hackers are earning upwards of $5 million a year from computer users who fall for the scam and pay the blackmail.</p>

Conservatives have long dismissed California, the nation's most-populous state and the world's ninth-largest economy, as the Left Coast, Wackyville and La-La Land. But after Tuesday's election, there is one thing that Republicans across the nation can no longer do - ignore it. The GOP failed to take the White House and lost an opportunity to reclaim control of the U.S. Senate, while trends that began in California - the burgeoning numbers of Latino, Asian American and young voters - are harbingers of what's ahead for Republican fortunes, Democratic consultant Garry South said. "They can denigrate this state all they want,"...

Jimmy Green's stepdaughter had never voted before. The 57-year-old is mentally disabled, and Green said she doesn't understand the concept of casting a ballot. But this week, she called her parents to say she had voted for President Obama. The care home in Fayetteville where she lives registered its residents to vote and drove them to the polls, Green said. "My concern is that somebody told her who to vote for," he said. "She didn't even know there's two different parties." Complaints of uncomprehending voters being ferried to cast ballots surface every election. And in a presidential race as close...

What leads a child to grow up and vote for a Republican candidate like Mitt Romney or a Democrat such as Barack Obama? Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that parenting style and childhood temperament plays a key role in determining a child’s future political mindset—as in, the bumper sticker your kid decides to slap on her car when she turns 18 might depend on how you reacted when she sneaked out of the house to meet her boyfriend. The study found that children of strict parents were more likely to turn conservative while those of lenient...

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[...] Today I thought I’d give you a little real-time training on just how much great information YOU, too, can collect by spying on lefties’ Facebook pages and also monitoring entertainment websites to see what Democrat talking points are saturating the public in that moment. The key is to monitor entertainment sites (like EW.com, People.com, AintItCool.com, and Deadline.com) instead of political sites like Daily Kos or Democratic Underground because the latter are really not representative of anything that would be seen by the general public. This is actually true of conservative sites too, which are also only read by people...

(10-18) 15:07 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A bright flash across the sky and a shaking boom awed Bay Area onlookers Wednesday evening, and one scientist says souvenirs of the phenomenon might be strewn in the hills around Martinez. A meteor, perhaps the size of a small car when it hit the Earth's atmosphere, put on a spectacular lightshow at 7:45 p.m. that was visible throughout the Bay Area and elsewhere in Northern and Central California. The accompanying noise was the meteor's sonic boom as it traveled faster than the speed of sound, said Jonathan Braidman, an astronomy instructor at Oakland's...

The nation's drought and high corn prices are devastating California's $8 billion dairy industry to the point where farmers can't afford to feed their cows - and their professional trade organization has been regularly referring despondent dairymen to suicide hotlines. Experts in the industry estimate that by year's end California, the largest dairy state in the nation, will have lost more than 100 dairies to bankruptcies, foreclosures and sales. Milk cows are being slaughtered at the fastest rate in more than 25 years because farmers need to save on corn costs. According to the Western United Dairymen, a California trade...

Brewster Kahle was a 19-year-old computer science student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when a friend posed a simple, yet life-changing question: "What can you do with your life that is worthwhile?" Kahle came up with two answers. The first, developing a microchip to ensure the privacy of telephone conversations, didn't pan out. But 32 years later, Kahle is still happily pursuing his second big idea - to create the digital-age version of the Great Library of Alexandria. His Internet Archive - fittingly based in an old Richmond District church that architecturally harks back to the ancient Egyptian library...

Snoop Dogg highlighted a list of top ten reasons to not vote for Mitt Romney as well as why one should vote for President Obama. The politically incorrect list refers to Romney as a “white n****” who looks like he “says n****” all the time.” Snoop Dogg, who recently changed his name to Snoop Lion, revealed the list, which is not his own, via Instagram. He took a photo of a notebook with the handwritten lists in two columns: “Why I’m Not Voting For Romney” and “Why I Am Voting For Obama.” [See list here] The number one reason cited...

A historic fight over whether Oakland can reform its own police force began in earnest Thursday when civil rights attorneys asked a federal judge to take the unprecedented step of appointing a receiver to ensure the changes are made. The attorneys said a broken culture in the department had turned a decadelong reform effort into a "chronic failure," endangering citizens - especially minorities - and costing the city tens of millions of dollars to settle police-abuse lawsuits. The lawyers represented more than 100 people who sued the city after four officers, who called themselves the Riders, were accused in 2000...

Highlands Ranch, Colo. -- From the glittering lights of Nevada casinos to the magnificent vistas and booming tech corridor of Colorado, the wide open spaces, big skies, and big aspirations of Western voters on both sides of the aisle have taken center stage in the 2012 presidential election. As President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney prepare to meet Wednesday in their first face-to-face debate at the University of Denver, the candidates have lavished attention and resources on the two Western swing states that could shape the outcome of the race. With 38 days left until the election, the economy and...

Yesterday, while campaigning in Ohio, Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan made a pit stop at Outdoor World to buy his 10-year-old daughter some camouflage clothing. We’re not talking about a trendy camo mini skirt. Ryan spent $101.14 on a hunting jacket and a pair of gloves for Liza to wear on her first deer-hunting trip. “She’s going to get to go hunting this year for the first time,” Ryan told NBC News. “She’s 10 years old so she can hunt starting at 10. “She’s been getting ready, she’s been practicing,” he added. “I just need to get her some...