I try to avoid cable news as much as possible, but there was a Sean Hannity story this week that I was glad to have heard.
It turns out that the Fox News host got his start on-air back in 1989 at KCSB, a community radio station in Santa Barbara. As reporter Valerie Hamilton explains, Hannity was causing waves even on that first show.
Fun fact: Back in the winter of 1861 and 1862, it rained for 43 days in California. The governor of California had to attend his inauguration by rowboat.
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Not so fun fact: A new study out of UCLA this week says a biblical flood like that could happen as often as every 50 years going forward. And just for good measure, extreme droughts are expected to happen more often too.
Sometimes, city council meetings are interminable experiences that you can’t wait to get away from. Other times, something bonkers happens.
Tuesday was a bonkers kind of night in Richmond. As KQED’s Ted Goldberg witnessed, Mayor Tom Butt exchanged some heated words with Councilwoman Jovanka Beckles and then just up and left the meeting.
But if you need a Burning Man pick-me-up, go visit the giant “Mama Penny Bear” statue in downtown San Jose. It’s literally a 12-foot bear made out of hundreds of thousands of pennies that’s part of a unique deal between Burning Man and San Jose to relocate art from the desert festival to the city’s streets.
This week, hundreds of California Muslims went to Sacramento to ask lawmakers to support legislation that would help prevent bullying of Muslim students, which is on the rise.
Many of them were students, and I was blown away by these young people who told KQED’s Farida Jhabvala Romero and lawmakers about the harassment they’d faced.
“I did get my hijab pulled off a few times, and to them it’s just pulling off a headscarf, but to us it’s pulling off our identity,” said Shad Alnashashibi, 15. “To them it’s nothing, but to us it’s almost everything.”
Yasmine Nayabkhil, 12, said she was picked on and called a “terrorist” in elementary school after she decided to start wearing her hijab, or head scarf. She sometimes ended the day in tears. “It obviously didn’t make me feel good inside. It made me feel really hurt, especially since I’ve known these kids in my class for over five years,” she said.
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