Sonoma State President Judy Sakaki, who faced an outcry over her leadership amid a campus sexual harassment and retaliation scandal involving her and her husband, announced Monday that she is stepping down.

The announcement marks the latest fallout from searing criticism over how California State University investigates and resolves sexual harassment and workforce retaliation complaints at its 23 campuses — a controversy that has shaken CSU’s leadership ranks and led its chancellor to step down in February.

In recent weeks, Sakaki’s leadership of the Northern California campus came under scrutiny after a Times investigation detailed how California State University paid $600,000 to settle a legal claim with a provost who reported retaliation and sexual harassment allegations involving Sakaki and her husband, Patrick McCallum, a prominent higher education lobbyist.

The provost, Lisa Vollendorf, alleged she faced retaliation from Sakaki, her boss, after she reported the sexual harassment accusations about McCallum to top officials at the chancellor’s office, records in the case show.

Sakaki and McCallum previously issued statements to The Times saying they had done nothing wrong. Sakaki denied retaliating against Vollendorf, declaring that the accusations “are utterly without basis.”


https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Sonoma-State-president-steps-down-amid-sexual-17223597.php

Cop to Drowning Man: 'I'm Not Jumping In'
Three officers in Tempe, Arizona, on leave after they watched a man drown

Three officers in Tempe, Arizona, have been placed on administrative leave after a transcript of their body cam video revealed a chilling scene: They ignored the pleas of a drowning man as he died on May 28, reports Fox10. "I'm going to drown. I’m going to drown," 34-year-old Sean Bickings tells the officers after he entered Tempe Town Lake and began to struggle. "OK, I’m not jumping in after you," an officer tells him from a bridge. The officers instead directed Bickings to swim to a pylon and hang on. At various times, Bickings is heard saying, "I can't, I can't," and, "Please help me. Please, please, please." Bickings eventually went under, and his body was later recovered.

The incident began when officers responded to some kind of disturbance between Bickings and a woman who identified herself as his partner near the reservoir, per the Washington Post. The woman told officers that Bickings had not physically harmed her, and officers were speaking with the pair and running background checks when Bickings climbed a railing and entered the lake despite officers telling him not to do so. He began swimming freestyle, but started to struggle after about 30 yards, per a city release. The release describes Bickings as "unsheltered," or homeless.

The city released body cam footage of the initial encounter; while it shows Bickings entering the water, it does not show his drowning. However, the city released a transcript of that unshown portion of the video. At one point, Bickings' partner also pleads with the officers. "I'm just distraught because he’s drowning right in front of you and you won’t help," she says. When an officer tells her that an officer is getting a boat, she responds, "No, no, no, swim."

A Bay Area government employee commissioned to write an exorbitantly expensive Santa Clara County government history book is under fire after the Mercury News found a significant portion of the manuscript was plagiarized from multiple sources, including its own publication, Wikipedia, SFGATE, the History Channel, the Washington Post and a number of other local and national news outlets.

Jean McCorquodale, the president of ​​McCorquodale Corporation and the wife of former county supervisor and state Sen. Dan McCorquodale, has been working for the county since 1995. Her duties included completing grant applications and related tasks before she became the county’s sole grant writer from 2009 to 2014, the Mercury News reported. Her contract was then renewed and she was tasked with the history book project in 2018, an undertaking that was delayed by two years. The county has reportedly paid her at least $2.45 million since 2009.

After the 580-page manuscript was finally submitted by Jean McCorquodale last January, the Mercury News found that many excerpts were allegedly copied word-for-word from the websites she was drawing her research from, including a section from the Wikipedia page for politician Jonathan D. Stevenson, a paragraph from a History Channel article about the Spanish-American War’s Treaty of Paris and segments from another page on the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation website.

The Santa Clara County Executive Office, which is conducting an investigation of the incident, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from SFGATE. But county executive Jeff Smith told the Mercury News he was “shocked” and “very concerned” to discover that passages from the draft submitted by McCorquodale were nearly identical to the source material.


https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Jean-McCorquodale-plagiarizes-Bay-Area-book-17221009.php

https://turbofuture.com/news/watch-one-drivers-outrageous-solution-to-car-being-blocked-on-narrow-road

Watch One Driver's Outrageous Solution To Car Being Blocked On Narrow Road
You get the feeling the driver has done this before.

One car is driving along a narrow road with cement guardrails on each side. The car encounters another car coming the other way. There isn't enough width in the road for the two vehicles to get past each other.

Watch this driver's wild maneuver to resolve the situation in a video posted by TikTok user @lianggeshuoche.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/someone-could-have-died-volusia-sheriff-pulls-over-accused-dui-driver-in-frightening-video/vi-AAY3Ez2

The Country Music Association has banned all Confederate flags and Confederate “flag imagery of any kind” at its upcoming festival for the first time.

The four-day CMA Fest in Nashville, one of the largest of its kind in the nation, will be held June 9-12 after a two-year suspension due to the COVID pandemic

Barring the Confederate flag was part of the CMA’s updated policy to protect the safety of fans, the organization said in a statement to the Tennessean newspaper.

“This year’s CMA Fest is our first major fan-facing event in nearly three years. We have always had policies in place that protect the safety of our fans and ban discrimination, but we felt it was important to further refine our language to explicitly outline what will and will not be tolerated,” the statement said.

The statement didn’t go into detail about safety issues concerning the flag, but the battle flags can be be intimidating and infuriating, and a flashpoint for conflict and violence.

“Our event policy ... states any behavior that causes one of our attendees to fear for their personal safety will not be tolerated, and that is inclusive of any displays of the Confederate flag,” the statement said.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/country-music-association-fest-bans-confederate-flags-for-first-time/ar-AAY45gz

citizens and police told him to stay out of the water many times, but victim was homeless and made money retrieving frisbees from the water.



https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/florida-man-killed-in-possible-alligator-attack-while-searching-lake-for-frisbees/ar-AAXYIH2

A man searching a Florida lake for Frisbees may have died as a result of a possible alligator attack, according to a news release from Largo Police Department.

The victim, who authorities have identified as 47-year-old Sean McGuinness, was discovered along the shoreline of Taylor Lake in Largo, Florida, by a bystander walking their dog early Tuesday morning, officials said. Largo is located just outside of Tampa, Florida.

Investigators believe the victim was looking for Frisbees sometime during the night when an alligator attacked him. “While the medical examiner will determine the exact cause of death, it was apparent that McGuinness suffered injuries related to alligators in the lake,” the release stated.

According to management at Taylor Park, McGuinness was known to frequent the park and enter the lake with disregard to the posted “No Swimming” signs, authorities said.

Shooter on the loose

Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange founded (and, up until recently, based) in San Francisco, is now rescinding job offers that were already accepted as headwinds continue to impact the tech and crypto industries at large.

In a letter sent to employees and made public Thursday, Coinbase’s chief people officer L.J. Brock said that the company would take back “a number of accepted offers” and “outstanding offers” — just weeks after the company announced that it would be pausing hiring. (That halt will continue “for the foreseeable future,” he added.) Brock did not specify how many offers would be rescinded.

“As these discussions have evolved, it’s become evident that we need to take more stringent measures to slow our headcount growth,” Brock wrote in the letter.

Affected new hires were informed Thursday, Brock said, via email. An internal email leaked on the anonymous job forum Blind allegedly assured incoming hires that their offers would not be rescinded, even if they had not signed the offers yet.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Coinbase-rescinds-accepted-job-offers-17217989.php?IPID=SFGate-HP-CP-Spotlight



https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1532570897214607361

https://twitter.com/sandofsky/status/1532782851468369920