Redwood City. One report indicates that very few people use the SMC Alert system, which is provided by the San Mateo County Office of Emergency Services (OES).
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues along with wildfires, emergency alerts and similar systems can save lives.
One of the suggestions that have been made to improve the coverage of this alarm is to change its optional nature. Instead of residents voluntarily registering, the system will work better if they are automatically registered, and leave it up to the users' discretion whether they want to receive the service, or unsubscribe.
The county jury also noted the language barrier in the list of reasons for low registration. Although approximately 9 percent of the county speaks Chinese, and 6.5 percent speaks Tagalog, alerts are only available in English and Spanish.
Daly City is a great example of the impact that the language barrier can have on registration. In this City, 66.4 percent of city residents speak a language other than English when they are at home. Daly City, the largest city in the county, however, has a 2.6 percent underwriting rate, the second lowest in the county. That's why the report recommends that the OSE translate all enrollment materials and alerts by March 31, 2021.
The report has three recommendations for the OSE: Obtain E-911 landline phone records; Access the public information registry to obtain bill payment data; and Continue negotiations with cell phone companies who have been reluctant to cooperate in the past.
San Mateo County's average underwriting rate of 10.6 percent is similar to other Bay Area counties. Santa Clara has 8.1 percent, and Sonoma County has 12 percent.
You can access the SMC Alert registration website at this link;
Through a release by various mass media outlets, residents of the San Francisco Bay Area have been notified about the performance of new tests for the detection of Covid-19SARS-CoV-2, a disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Through the public announcement, it was indicated that testing for Covid-19 should be scheduled by appointment in one of the venues, which will change depending on the response of the people.
This Tuesday, it was announced that one of the venues takes place at the Cupertino Senior Center, located at 21251 Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino.
In addition, the message ends by inviting the public to stay in touch for more information by calling (408) 808-7863 or sending an email to pio@eoc.sccgov.org.
District police said Tuesday that more bomb threats have emerged targeting Fremont Unified School District (DEUF).
The most recent threats were released Tuesday morning and are in addition to the 13 other schools that received bomb threats last week.
This Tuesday morning, 10 schools were targeted of implausible bomb threats, police said in conjunction with school authorities.
CJ CammackThe District Superintendent issued a statement to the school community noting that Tuesday morning's threats share similarities to those made last week. The bomb threats against the schools were made via e-mail.
Meanwhile, students are maintaining distance education, so school buildings remain empty, police said. Cammack said that, unlike last week, the situation continues uninterrupted Tuesday.
The police raided the school premises in question this Tuesday morning. The list of schools for the bomb threat can be found by clicking here.
REDWOOD CITY, CA - Isabel Perez and her husband lost the two jobs they each had in San Francisco restaurants due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They owe three months' rent and, if the moratorium on evictions ending Aug. 30 in Saint Matthew doesn't spread, they'll be out on the street with their ten-year-old son.
About 6,900 people in the wealthy settlement of San Francisco Peninsula are in danger of losing their homes at the end of this month. On August 21, approximately 100 people, including tenants and activists, demonstrated in the yard of the San Mateo County Center in Redwood City to ask the the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors an extension of the moratorium on evictions.
Nazanin Salehi, attorney for the Community Legal Services Housing Program in East Palo Alto said that people of color face disproportionate eviction in San Mateo County. More than 4,100 households with children are being evicted, he said, adding that children will also lose their schools once they are evicted because San Mateo County schools are primarily dedicated to distance learning during the pandemic.
The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the county is $2,700. "People are faced with a $10,000 to $20,000 debt in rent," he said.
Salehi and local housing justice activists are advocating for a model in which San Mateo County pays up to 75 percent of the tenant's debt directly to the landlord, to prevent eviction. On August 4, at their last official meeting, San Mateo County supervisors denied an extension of the current moratorium on evictions that began on March 25 and ends on August 30 of this year.
"Our supervisors have decided that it is more important for homeowners to continue to earn money and evict workers from their homes than for families to remain in safe homes," said Jason Tarricone, director of the housing program at East Palo Alto Community Legal Services, one of the protest organizers.
Across the state of California, approximately 4 million people could be at risk of losing their homes on September 2, when a state moratorium, issued by the California Judicial Council on April 6th. The Judicial Council declared earlier this month that it will not extend the moratorium, and expects the state Legislature to take action.
But the time for action is short: the Legislature adjourns on Aug. 31.
The law AB 1436which has made its way into the State Assembly, would offer an eviction subsidy to tenants in the state. Under the bill's provisions, landlords can use various methods to extract rent owed to their tenants, but cannot evict them.
AB 1436 encourages landlords and tenants to develop a system for late rent, without late fees. It also mandates the elimination of negative consequences, such as an eviction notice appearing on a tenant's credit report.
Nisha Vyas, senior attorney at the Western Center on Law and PovertyThe governor said it is crucial that the state Legislature pass the bill before the session ends Aug. 31. "The housing crisis in California was ongoing long before the pandemic.
"We are facing a momentous social change. We have to stop this now," he said.
Jennifer Kwart, communications director for Assemblyman David Chiu, the lead sponsor of AB 1436, said the bill is stuck in the Senate Rules CommitteeA space in which tenants' and owners' supporters can express their points of view for a better version of the project.
"The owners are vehemently opposed to the bill. Tenants would like it to go further," Kwart said, expressing optimism that a version of the bill will pass before the Legislature adjourns.
It's pretty clear something has to be done. We told people to stay home, and we told businesses to close. Millions of people lost their jobs and can't pay their rent, not because of you.
"The consequence of evicting so many people will have a profound impact," Kwart said, citing an alarming increase in the number of homeless, the increased spread of COVID, and an overall decline in California's economy.
"This could be catastrophic for our state," he added.
"What we are experiencing is serious, very unfair and worrisome," said Adriana Guzman, a San Mateo County activist, in an interview with EMS.
According to Guzman, the refusal of supervisors to extend the moratorium is causing some landlords to put pressure on tenants. "Yesterday I received a call from an elderly woman who was desperate because her landlord was harassing her so much that he told her to pay her now or leave, but the landlord is acting inappropriately because the moratorium is still in place.
Guzman says that while he was on the phone with the woman who had been harassed by her landlord, she felt the high level of stress she was feeling, and her husband had to take her to the emergency doctor.
"Many people like this family are going through unnecessary stress. Those most affected by the upcoming eviction crisis are the elderly and children, as they are the most vulnerable. That's why we are asking supervisors to consider that supporting families is in the best interest of the entire county.
"Supervisors have the power to stop these evictions and save people's homes," said Gabriel Manrique, a member of El Comité and Luna. "They must extend the moratorium until the end of the state of emergency, approve a policy to make tenant debt during the COVID-19 pandemic non-evictionable, and allocate more funds to rental assistance for tenants and mortgage subsidy for small property owners.
With additional report from Sunita Sohrabji/EMS Contributing Editor
He managed to obtain 900 million dollars from investors to launch his project and his company was valued at 9 billion dollars.
Rober Diaz / Peninsula 360 Press
SILICON VALLEY- Elizabeth Holmes is a particular woman, she dared to scam Silicon Valley's finicky investors. She was an intense follower of Steve Jobs, she even dressed like him using high turtlenecks, dark clothes and adopted the treatment that the former CEO of Apple had with his employees; it is even said that she had the same look that Steve used to convince his interlocutors and close deals.
Holmes dropped out of Stanford's Chemical Engineering program early to start her own company - does this sound familiar to any Silicon Valley entrepreneurial success story? She also said that she had lost an uncle to cancer and that it was the lack of early diagnosis that caused his death; with this motivation she founded the company "Theranos", a play on words between therapy and diagnosis. He took a professor from his university to work for him and launched a product that allowed a medical diagnosis with just a drop of blood.
So far so good, however the product he presented and so the scientific community argues, is impossible to do because with that single drop of blood also promised that you could do up to a hundred tests on different ailments, from a basic disease like high cholesterol to diseases as complicated as cancer. The results could be delivered to the corner drugstore where you would find a machine called Edison that would also manufacture "Theranos" with which you would get the results in three hours.
She managed to obtain 900 million dollars from investors to get her project off the ground and her company was valued at 9 billion dollars. She went from having only one employee (the professor who left with her) to 500 employees developing Edison, the idea that was not yet a reality and that had helped her to obtain the financing.
In a very short time the press began to compare her to Steve Jobs. Forbes magazine declared her the richest woman in America. But "Theranos" had not really produced anything yet. She was authoritarian within the company and when any of the employees questioned her mandates, she fired them and looked for someone else who could carry them out.
Another issue to be analyzed was her voice, for Elizabeth when she spoke in public faked a more guttural voice than the one she usually used, strange wasn't it? Well, coupled with Holmes' terrible character and essentially the fact that she was asking her team something practically impossible, everything started to fall apart.
Elizabeth sued a former college classmate for appropriating her work. In the legal back-and-forth, Ian Gibbons, the man in charge of making Edison work, was called to testify. Gibbons had two options: accept that the whole thing was a fraud or lie and wait for the whole thing to fall apart. He chose neither and committed suicide. The investigator's wife was threatened by Holmes and the matter remained there until reporter Jhon Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal, discovered the farce.
The research Carreyrou published was part of a best-selling book called "Bad Blood. Secret and Lies in Silicon Valley Startup", where the real rot was uncovered, as the research confirmed that many people had used Edison and that their results caused -because they were frighteningly wrong- pernicious consequences in the consumers of it and that all the results shown as advances of the research were lies.
During the trial where Elizabeth would be left penniless and where "Theratos" would be destroyed, she would arrive happy and greet everyone as if nothing had happened, assuring that everyone was lying.
She was disqualified from creating or running a company -any company- for ten years. By the way, the guy we talked about in the beginning, who she claimed had given her the inspiration to create "Theratos", never existed.
Adriana Guzman, an activist in San Mateo County, during the protest in the courtyard of the Santa Clara County Center, located in Redwood City, to ask San Mateo County supervisors for an extension of the moratorium on evictions. "What we are experiencing is serious, very unfair and disturbing."
