Crosscurrents

Jerry Brown afraid of potheads... Oregon & Washington go legit... Customer etiquette in Colorado... Tenants right to smoke indoors not valid... Gold rolling papers?... Gupta doubles down on cannabis... and more. 

LEGALIZATION

Gov. Brown fears potheads can’t stay alert enough to be good citizens // Sac Bee

Since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the link between the two countries has been undeniable. Fremont, in the East Bay, has the largest Afghani community in the U.S. Local Children’s author Naheed Senzai is married to Afghan American political scientist Fareed Senzai, who has an incredible story of fleeing Afghanistan with this family as a boy, and ending up in Fremont, where he has lived ever since. 

Trade representatives from twelve countries have been discussing the Trans-Pacific Partnership for four years. They’re discussing removing tariffs, protecting the environment, and stopping the piracy of copyrighted  material - all in the name of freer international trade.

Not much is known about what’s in this agreement, but based on what’s been leaked, here’s what we think we know about a couple of key components that will affect Californians: cows and computers.

On the farm

All week long we've been playing this sound, and asking you to guess what exactly it is and where exactly in the Bay Area we recorded it.

Mike Scriven’s driving a big truck on the levees of an island called Terminous. He’s in charge of maintaining the levees here, and that means he’s looking for … squirrels. He spots something out his window, stops the truck, and shows me freshly dug holes. 

“Now here’s something that we’re always watching for, is all this squirrel activity that you see here,” he says.

It’s a danger sign to Scriven. Squirrels, he says, can burrow into or underneath a levee.