A woman from Ukiah has been convicted of drunk driving, with an additional penalty for driving over 100 miles an hour on Highway 101 and on the shoulder of South Perkins Street. Police testified that when they pulled over Jewelina Acosta on June 20th, his blood alcohol level was above the legal limit of .08. Before the jury was even selected, Acosta pleaded guilty ot a separate charge of driving without a license–a license that was suspended because of an earlier drunk driving case. Because of the plea, the jury couldn’t be told about the earlier suspension or the reason for it.
Mendocino County is getting $315,000 to pay costs associated with running November’s statewide vote to decide on redistricting. The state is allocating more than 250 million dollars to cash-strapped counties, many of which had no plans to run an election this fall and hadn’t budgeted for it. Voters will take up the democratic backed redistricting bill, to counter Texas redrawing its political lines to move at least 5 republican members of Congress into more favorable districts.
California now has its own guidance for vaccines, going against decades of following CDC recommendations. Governor Newsom has signed a law that aligns its vaccination policies with Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii as part of a new West Coast alliance. The states now have their own recommendations about who should get vaccinated, bucking recent changes made by the CDC. They’ll instead rely on their own experts and independent medical groups. Governor Newsome says the latest CDC guidelines–especially for the COVID and RSV vaccines– are driven by politics, not by science. Also on the vaccine front, lawmakers are studying a proposed ballot measure that would spend 23 billion dollars on research, to offset what they say it the lots of federal dollars under the Trump Administration. If it passes in the legislature, voters would have their say in November 2026. A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation says Americans are becoming more concerned–and more confused–about federal vaccine policies. Governor Newsom and the other governors hope their new alliance will clear up some of that uncertainty.
