BART alerted riders on the social media platform X around 4 p.m. that the Red line was cancelled due to the delay. The Green and Blue lines were diverted to MacArthur Station. The delay was caused by earlier equipment problems on a train.

According to BART’s media line, around 5:27 p.m., the disabled train was taken out of service and the transit agency was working on restoring regular service to the Red, Green and Blue lines. Around 5:30 p.m., BART posted on X that Green and Blue line service was restored.

Around the same time, BART reported that trains were not stopping at 24th St. Mission due to police activity. Minutes later, service was restored to 24th St. and Mission.

The agency posted around 1 p.m. that firefighters were setting up a rope system for a recovery mission on the beach south of Davenport in Santa Cruz County. They were able to bring the body up from the beach to the bluffs before clearing the scene.

The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook that “due to the close proximity to the recent shark attack victim in Monterey County,” they will be working with the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office and the Pacific Grove Police Department on the recovery.

The action comes after a 55-year-old swimmer named Erica Fox disappeared on Sunday near Lovers Point in Pacific Grove, where sharks were reportedly seen in the area. KSBW reported that the body was a woman, but officials did not release any identifying information.

Banatao is known for pioneering the technology that made personal computers possible, thus putting Silicon Valley on the map. He also co-founded three technology companies and started a nonprofit to help support Filipinos in STEM fields.

“Rising from humble beginnings in Cagayan, he went on to co-found transformative technology companies and played a pivotal role in advancing the global semiconductor and graphics industries,” said the National Federation of Filipino American Associations on LinkedIn in honor of Banatao’s passing. “Just as importantly, he invested deeply in people opening doors, mentoring founders and strengthening communities.”

According to a post on his website by his family, Banatao passed away peacefully on Christmas Day, surrounded by family and friends. His family said he “succumbed to complications from a neurological disorder that hit him late in his life.” He would have been 80 in May.

His family wrote, “We are mourning his loss, but take comfort from the time spent with him during this Christmas season, and that his fight with this disease is over.”

Banatao was born to a rice farmer and housekeeper in Iguig, Cagayan, according to ABS-CBN. According to his 2015 documentary, he didn’t have access to electricity growing up and was taught math using bamboo sticks. He said it was typical for his classmates to stop going to school after sixth grade to help their parents work in the fields, but his father told him to continue studying.

He developed a love for engineering and graduated with a degree in electric engineering from Mapua Institute of Technology, a private research university in Manila. He said in his documentary that there were no design jobs for engineers in the Philippines, so he moved to the U.S. and pursued a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University. He graduated in 1972.

Soon after college, Banatao worked as a design engineering at Boeing. ABS-CBN reported that he then went on to work for other technology companies, like National Semiconductor and Intersil. While at Commodore International, he designed the first single chip, 16-bit microprocessor-based calculator.

He is credited with developing the first 10-Mbit ethernet CMOS chip in 1981 while working at Seeq Technology. He also developed the first system logic chipset for IBM’s PC-XT and PC-AT and one of the first graphics accelerators for personal computers. These inventions allowed for faster computer performance, according to Inquirer.net. The Harvard Club of Southern California credited Banatao for bringing GPS technology to consumers.

“Dado is the man who invented a graphical chipset that took us from black screens with green writing to the dynamic displays we have today,” the club wrote for a description of a lecture he gave in 2017 for the Harvard Business School Association of Orange County.

Banatao founded the chipset company Mostron with a business partner in 1984. One year later, he also co-founded Chips and Technologies, a graphics adapter company that Intel later acquired for around $430 million.

The CEO of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan, expressed his grief at Banatao’s passing on LinkedIn, crediting his friend for challenging him when he became CEO of Cadence Design in 2009.

“I am forever grateful for your challenge and encouragement as I continue my life journey following your footstep as CEO of Cadence Design for 12 years and continuing as CEO intel,” Tan said in his post. “Dado, you are the best technology entrepreneur and legend from (the) Philippines.”

He then founded S3 Graphics in 1989, which led the local bus concept and developed Windows accelerator chips, becoming the third-most profitable technology company in 1993. In 2000, Banatao entered the world of venture capital by founding Tallwood Venture, a firm focused on investing in semiconductor technology, and served as managing partner.

While working at Tallwood in 2011, Banatao told Bloomberg News that he encouraged his companies to expand internationally, focusing particularly in China, due to greater government support and lower production costs.

“It used to be that we started companies here and we didn’t think about going offshore until we were substantially big,” Banatao said when he was 64 at his office in Palo Alto. “At the outset now, as we fund the company, we think about going outside right away.”

Dinakar Munagala, co-founder and CEO at Blaize, Inc., a computer hardware manufacturer in El Dorado Hills, wrote on LinkedIn that he was “deeply saddened” by Banatao’s death.

“Dado was instrumental in shaping Blaize during its formative years,” Munagala said. “His belief in our mission, steady counsel, and generous spirit left a lasting mark on all of us who had the privilege of learning from him.”

Banatao has received several awards and recognitions for his contributions, including the Pamana ng Filipino Award in 1997, Asian Leadership Award in 1993, and the Ramon V. Del Rosario Award in 2018, according to ABS-CBN. In 2003, the Asian American Activities Center at Stanford recognized Banatao in the university’s Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame.

Inquirer.net also reported that an institute at the University of California bears his name: the Banatao Institute at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.

Banatao founded the Philippine Development Science and Technology Foundation, a nonprofit also known as PhilDev that provides scholarships, mentorship and training programs to young Filipinos in STEM fields. His family urged people to donate to PhilDev in Banatao’s memory.

“We (Filipinos) know hardship,” Banatao said in his documentary. “It’s time we learn success.”

Staff writer Kyle Martin contributed to this report. 

Naheed Mangi, 70, was convicted earlier this year of intentional damage to a protected computer. Prosecutors say that after being fired, she changed the database by replacing patient information with gibberish and childish insults like, “doctor too stupid.”

While the incident happened in 2013, Mangi wasn’t indicted until 2018, and wasn’t convicted until a jury trial last February, records show. Prosecutors asked for a 10-month sentence to be split between jail and house arrest, but instead Senior U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila sentenced Mangi to probation.

Her attorney argued in court that no time in custody was a just outcome.

“Notably, for the seven years since her arrest, Ms. Mangi has complied with her conditions of release. She is 70 years old and has lived at the same address for the past 28 years,” a defense sentencing memo says. “Ms. Mangi is currently unemployed, living a solitary life on her social security and savings.”

Mangi must pay $10,520.69 in restitution, court records show.

Mangi was working on a Stanford University study, sponsored by Genentech, testing a new, experimental pharmaceutical treatment for breast cancer. Prosecutors argued her actions betrayed the trust of patients who agreed to participate in the study, and that it was motivated by Mangi’s hurt feelings from being fired.

Brandon Johnson, 37, was charged last week with human trafficking of a minor, soliciting a child to prostitute and pandering, court records show. At the time of his arrest on Dec. 19, he was out on bail for pending charges of kidnapping a suspected adult sex worker in front of an undercover cop, court records show.

Police say a relative of a 14-year-old girl called police and told them the girl was with Johnson at the Bay Breeze Inn in Oakland. Police went there and found not only the girl, but a 15-year-old girl, as well as a replica gun in Johnson’s hotel room, according to court records.

Authorities allege that Johnson met one of the girl’s when she was at a youth crisis center in San Francisco and had been with her for several weeks. He reportedly gave the girls $500 daily quotas, instructing them to be sexually abused by adult strangers for as long as it took to make that amount, according to court records.

Johnson was arrested and charged back in May after an undercover officer allegedly saw him throwing a woman in a bikini into his vehicle and driving off, as she screamed for help. He posted $100,000 bail and was released from jail, records show. Johnson’s lawyer refuted the charges by arguing that the woman police identified as the victim denied it, and said she witnessed a different person throwing a different woman in his car.

Now Johnson is back behind bars at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, with bail set at $670,000, records show. He has pleaded not guilty and is due in court next on Jan. 12.

Johnson’s arrest was one of two near-identical incidents that occurred in Oakland that week. On Dec. 15, Oakland police rescued two runaway teen girls, aged 14 and 15, and arrested their alleged trafficker, Terrell Williams, who was later charged with rape, statutory rape and crimes related to alleged sex trafficking, court records show.

Isaac Landry, 51, no longer faces the charge in the Sept. 2 shooting of 43-year-old Robert Abeyta, a Rodeo resident shot during an early morning fight outside a store on the 3800 block of San Pablo Avenue in Emeryville. Landry still faces charges of being an accessory after the fact — a felony — and leading police on a brief chase, a misdemeanor, records show.

Landry’s co-defendant, 52-year-old Armand Watson, is charged with murder and gun possession. Police say that during a fight outside the store, Watson responded to a threat by Abeyta by saying, “you’re going to kill who?” then shooting Abeyta in the head. Landry then allegedly stomped on Abeyta’s head after he was fatally shot.

Both men were charged with murder, but at a November preliminary hearing, Judge Thomas Reardon said there wasn’t enough evidence to uphold Landry’s murder charge and threw it out. He released Landry from jail the same day but gave him a 6 p.m. curfew. Both men pleaded not guilty on Nov. 26 and are next due in court in January, records show.

At the hearing, police and an eyewitness testified to Abeyta’s aggressive, racist behavior before the shooting. About a half-hour he was killed, he threatened a Black woman and called her racist slurs several times for walking too closely to his car, she testified. Landry’s attorney said he also made “monkey sounds” at her.

Later, Abeyta told Landry, “get the (expletive) out of here,” and then added a racial slur during the confrontation. Landry and Watson were at the store together to buy cigarettes when they began arguing with Abeyta, police testified. The entire thing was caught on security cameras at the store.

At first, Landry told Watson and Abeyta to “break it up” when they began to go back and forth. During the confrontation, Abeyta threatened the men, and reached for his waistband. Watson later told police he thought Abeyta had a knife, but police say he didn’t actually have one.

Prosecutors argued that Watson appeared “calm” and methodically retrieved his gun from his car and killed Abeyta. They argued in court that Landry’s “support played a key role in emboldening Mr. Watson to repeatedly shoot the victim in this case” and that him stomping on Abeyta’s head after the shooting showed incredible “callousness.”

Abeyta was pronounced dead from gunshot wounds at a hospital later that morning. A pathologist determined the head stomps didn’t play a role in his death, police testified.

During police questioning, Landry said he regretted that Abeyta was killed.

“I wasn’t trying to kill the man,” Landry said, adding that he “would not do that over a simple argument,” an Emeryville police detective testified.

More than 17 million Californians have health insurance through their job, according to a survey released in November by the health information group KFF. The average cost of premium payments for an employee’s family plan rose 24% to $28,400 a year, the survey found. Meanwhile, the national inflation rate was 12%, and wages grew by 14%, KFF wrote.

Health insurance premiums have risen year after year for decades. But costs spiked after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by industry consolidation, increasing use of Ozempic and similar weight-loss drugs and other factors, according to KFF. Together, these forces are putting pressure on families and businesses, while some major health insurance providers in California continue to post profits.

“People are paying more and more, it’s taking up more and more of their family budgets, and they’re getting less,” said Miranda Dietz, who leads UC Berkeley Labor Center’s health program.

Along with rising premiums, more California employees also face increasing out-of-pocket costs. Workers bear indirect costs, too, Dietz said. As businesses spend more on health plans, they spend less on wages and other benefits, she said. She cited a study that concluded the average family with employer-sponsored health insurance would have earned nearly $9,000 more in 2019 if the cost of care hadn’t increased disproportionately since the late 1980s.

Under the Affordable Care Act, businesses with at least 50 full-time equivalent employees must offer health insurance coverage that meets affordability and care requirements, or face fines. Workers and businesses split the cost, and in practice, businesses shoulder most of the burden: employers pay about three-quarters of a family plan premium, on average, and about 85% of single plans, according to KFF.

At the independent bookstore Booksmith in San Francisco’s storied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, owner Christin Evans said four of her employees qualify for health benefits. She said she covers the full cost of her workers’ Kaiser Permanente care — one of her “top expenses” of doing business.

Her costs are rising, she said, by about 17% — to $3,250 each month in 2026 from $2,776 in 2025. Last year, premiums rose 7.5%, she said.

“Many small business owners will likely decide to cut benefit offerings and reduce wages,” said Bianca Blomquist, director of the advocacy group Small Business Majority California, in an email. “While some entrepreneurs may even close up shop and go work for someone else, mainly so they can access quality health insurance.”

Faced with high health insurance costs, owners could be unable to make other investments in their businesses, she said.

Matthew Rae, associate director of KFF’s health care marketplace program, led the California survey. Between January and July 2025, KFF oversaw interviews with 460 employee benefit managers at companies based in California or with workers here.

In an interview, Rae pinned part of the cost spike on the pandemic, which officially ended in May 2023. During the worst days of the pandemic, in 2020 and 2021, insurance costs grew slowly as patients delayed serious care, he said.

Then “pent-up” need for care arrived, inflation nationally drove up prices and health care workers fought for better pay and benefits, Rae said.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law in 2023 setting separate minimum wages for health care employees, which reached $24 per hour at hospitals with 10,000 or more full-time employees this year. (The state’s general minimum wage is $16.50 per hour.)

Meanwhile, more Californians began using expensive GLP-1s such as Ozempic or Wegovy to manage diabetes and lose weight, Rae said. The hospital industry became more consolidated nationally, he said, which contributes to rising costs by reducing competition. More than 400 hospital and health system mergers were announced from 2018 to 2023, KFF said.

Meanwhile, some of California’s biggest insurers are posting profits.

An analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit watchdog, found Kaiser Permanente put $27 billion into reserves in the last four years. The Oakland-based health giant reports several billion dollars of profit each quarter. Elevance Health, the publicly-traded parent company of Anthem Blue Cross, reported $1.2 billion in profit in the third quarter of 2025, up from $1 billion the year prior, the Wall Street Journal reported.

While health plan premiums rose for workers and employers over the past three years, the quality of the insurance declined. The KFF survey found that 75% of workers now have a deductible, up from 68% three years ago.

According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, less than half of Californians in the private sector had a deductible 20 years ago. Rae said that it can strain workers and their families.

“There’s a lot of worry about the affordability of plans for even people who are working,” or who have a family member who is, Rae said. “You’re pushing people past their assets, because the deductibles are too high.”

At the same time, changes are happening outside of the employer-based health insurance market. The new KFF data arrived in November as public health experts and patients began to brace for a big shake-up in the individual health insurance market: the expiration of Affordable Care Act tax credits that have benefited enrollees since 2021. In California, monthly premiums for those plans will double on average, according to Covered California, the state’s Affordable Care Act marketplace.

Self-employed freelancers and contractors, in particular, can expect major price spikes when the credits expire at the end of December. But small business owners and their workers make up half of all Affordable Care Act enrollees nationally, said Blomquist, of the small business advocacy group.

The early part of LaBarbera’s Sunday shift is peacefully spent capturing, banding and releasing birds in what they call a “little oasis of trees.” But around 9:00 am every week, their team of volunteers hears a cacophony of car horns from I-880, less than half a mile to the east.

“You become really aware of the noise when you get away from it for a little bit,” said LaBarbera, a science director at the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory.

The Bay Area is a permanent or temporary home for 250 different species of resident and migratory birds. Noise can affect their stress response, interfere with their ability to listen for predators and prey, and alter their vocalizations. But for conservationists striving to preserve the region’s threatened bird populations, disturbance from traffic, airplane and other noise is an unavoidable backdrop—and one that, until recently, has been little studied.

“I realized we knew hardly anything about how birds respond to noise pollution,” he says.

Scientists’ understanding of the impact of urban noise on birds advanced during the COVID-19 pandemic, however. When the Bay Area shut down in March 2020, researchers like Jennifer Phillips — then working with Francis through a National Science Foundation Fellowship — had been studying the songs of white-crowned sparrows in San Francisco and Richmond. They were able to record how the songs changed when the noise subsided. In a paper published in Science magazine, they reported that male sparrows sang more quietly and used lower frequencies when not having to compete with traffic noise.

But the pandemic’s muting of urban noise is long gone. And while the wetland birds of the South Bay don’t sing, they have to compete with urban sounds when they use vocalizations to communicate with each other and ward off predators.

The South Bay’s Salt Pond Restoration Project — the largest tidal restoration effort on the West Coast — provides habitat to the threatened Ridgway’s rail, an elusive species of bird that spends most of its time hiding in the tidal marsh where it nests. The project area also hosts about 10 percent of the population of endangered western snowy plovers. These tiny shorebirds now depend on the salt ponds and tidal flats — as well as on their normal habitat of sandy beaches — for nesting and foraging.

But the salt ponds are located directly under flight paths from Oakland Airport and Moffett Federal Airfield. Nearby highways and Union Pacific railroad tracks mean birds in the project area are constantly impacted by noise from planes, trains and automobiles.

Chronic noise “shrinks an animal’s perpetual word,” Francis said. When noise increases, the distance over which birds can hear sounds reduces.

While the effect of noise on rail species has not been studied directly, they vocalize at fairly low frequencies, which transportation noise tends to drown out.

Plovers, on the other hand, may be more sensitive to sudden noises. A large truck zooming by an otherwise quiet area, a barking dog or a cellphone ringing can create the illusion of a threat, causing birds to react.

“Episodic or intermittent noise is, I think, a bigger deal for wildlife than something steady or constant like highway noise or a data center or whatever else,” said Dave Halsing, project manager of the Salt Pond Restoration Project.

Francis recalls baby plovers on the Oceano Dunes near Pismo Beach on the Central Coast spending their nights darting away from their habitats, disturbed by off-road vehicles. The inexperienced chicks interpret the noise as an immediate threat and expend energy trying to evade it.

Still, Bay Area ornithologists and bird lovers are preoccupied with addressing more immediate threats of habitat destruction from further development, which means noise pollution is a lower priority.

“In conservation, we’re usually worried about the absolute emergency situation,” LaBarbera said.

Urban noise isn’t going away, but small changes can make a difference. Francis points to the growing number of cities enacting leaf blower regulations, which while they are often aimed at curbing emissions also help to reduce noise pollution. Switching to electric vehicles, choosing tire materials that generate less road noise, and adopting quieter jet engines can all help.

Managers of the Salt Pond Restoration Project are doing their part, taking steps to reduce noise in their own construction work when making trails or fortifying levees to reduce flood risk. They try to use less intrusive construction equipment, such as vibratory pile drivers. Halsing said the project is also required to implement buffer zones of several hundred feet between their construction work and certain species, including rails.

It’s a time-honored practice in conservation: Working for wildlife, while keeping one’s distance.

For three days, Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept Valera in the metal-clad room on the sixth floor above the courtroom, according to a declaration he submitted to a judge. There were no beds, and the lights remained on at all hours. Detainees were forced to share a single toilet against the wall.

“They treated us like animals,” the 47-year-old Peruvian man told Bay Area News Group.

On Christmas Eve, five months after Velera’s arrest, a federal judge in San Jose temporarily barred ICE from making arrests at immigration courts across Northern California. Bay Area immigration advocates sued to halt the arrests, which they argue force those seeking refuge in the United States to choose between skipping their court dates, thereby increasing their chances of deportation, or attending the proceedings and risking detention.

“This ruling is a critical step in ensuring that immigrants can safely pursue their immigration cases without fear of arrest,” Jordan Wells, an attorney for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, said in a statement.

The decision by U.S. District Court Judge P. Casey Pitts applies to ICE’s San Francisco area of responsibility, encompassing Northern and Central California, as far south as Bakersfield, and Hawaii. Pitts found advocates raised credible claims that the arrests have a chilling effect on court attendance and undermine the immigration court system. 

He ordered the ruling remain in place until a final judgment is entered in the case. It’s unclear when the lawsuit could be resolved.

This year, there have been at least 75 documented immigration court arrests in San Francisco, including Valera, and at least 39 in Sacramento, advocates said in an October court filing. It was unclear how many people have been arrested at the Bay Area’s other immigration court in Concord.

Attorneys for ICE argue that a January directive allowing the courthouse arrests nationwide is legal “operational guidance” authorized by the Trump administration. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

Under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, ICE arrests have surged, often topping 1,000 a day, according to data from UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project. About a third of those arrested this year had no criminal record, according to analyses of the data by NPR and other news organizations.

“We are making America safe again and putting the American people first,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement earlier this month. “We have secured the border, taken the fight to cartels, and arrested thousands upon thousands of criminal illegal aliens.”

Valera, who has asked a court to grant him asylum, came to the United States three years ago, leaving behind his wife and young sons after fleeing criminal groups that he says threatened his life in his home country. Valera said he obtained a work permit and that he has cooperated with immigration officials while applying for asylum to remain in the U.S.

But after walking out of his immigration hearing on July 25, ICE immediately apprehended him. Soon after being taken to the holding cell, Valera said he began to feel half of his body going numb. Handcuffed to a stretcher, he spent the next day under observation at a hospital in San Francisco.

After being taken back to the cell, Valera said he received only small burritos and a chocolate bar at each meal. He and other detainees did their best to keep the area clean, but a small trash can in the corner quickly overflowed. The air conditioning ran constantly, and the men slept huddled together in the cell.

“They made us sleep on the floor in handcuffs,” Valera said.

Now, agents overseeing the San Francisco cells must provide detainees beds, clean clothes, basic hygiene products, medically necessary diets and to dim lights during sleeping hours, among other requirements, following a November injunction secured by advocates in the courthouse arrest case. 

ICE did not respond to a request for comment on the cell conditions. But government attorneys told the court the agency is complying with the injunction.

From San Francisco, Valera was transferred to a holding cell in Oakland before being flown to a larger detention facility in Arizona. A judge ordered his release about a week later, determining he had been unlawfully detained, attorneys said.

Valera was dropped off at a bus station and used his own money to buy a ticket back to San Francisco for the next day. He booked a motel room, where he took his first shower since his arrest about two weeks earlier.

Despite the ordeal, Valera, who currently rents a space in a home in Daly City, said he plans to continue his asylum case in hopes of making a better life for himself in the U.S. He wants to one day bring his family to join him.

“There are people who have gone through things that are far worse than what I went through, and I don’t wish that on anybody,” he said. “It’s very traumatic, to be honest, and I hope one day this all ends, that it goes back to normal, and that they don’t treat us that way. You come to work, not to commit crimes.”

The defendant, listed in court records as a 23-year-old Dublin resident who is serving a yearlong sentence in the jail, was charged on Dec. 2 with custodial possession of a weapon. At a Dec. 8 court appearance, prosecutors dismissed the charge, according to court filings.

The man was serving a sentence for false imprisonment on Nov. 27, when a deputy conducting a search allegedly found a sharpened toothbrush stashed in his sock. The man allegedly told investigators he possessed the deadly weapon for “self-defense,” according to court records.

A minute order for the December court hearing says prosecutors filed an oral motion to dismiss the case “in the interests of justice.” The man’s yearlong jail sentence is subject to a potential 50 percent reduction for good behavior behind bars, court records show.