“Top Chef” star Tom Colicchio likes what he tastes in SF school lunchroom

By Jill Tucker on October 9, 2014 3:50 PM

 For Video of Nancy Pelosi and Top Chef Star Click Here:   

U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi donned an apron Thursday to cook up some yogurt-based ranch dressing with television chef Tom Colicchio at San Francisco’s Mission High School to show support for healthy food in schools.

The cooking demonstration was a far cry from reality TV food competitions, Collicchio — head judge on “Top Chef” — gave the food high marks.

“This is what you get in school?” Colicchio asked assembled students as he tried the ranch dressing on a sample size of turkey chef salad served in district cafeterias. “This is awesome.”
San Francisco contracts with Revolution Foods, which uses whole grains and fresh produce in its school breakfast, lunch and supper meals.

Superintendent Richard Carranza said it was an opportunity to show off the district’s commitment to fresh, locally grown and healthy food despite the extra expense.
“It’s not an expense,” Carranza said. “It’s an investment.”

Colicchio said he was impressed by the sample meals he tasted — noting that his mom ran a school lunchroom when he was a kid and that the food didn’t look anything like what he ate at Mission High Thursday.

“How can we as a country not afford healthy food in schools,” said Calicchio, a board member of Food Policy Action, a nonprofit focused on high quality foods.

Student Tanusree Chakraborty could barely contain her excitement as she watched Colicchio cook and tour the school garden.

“I was so excited,” she said of meeting him, adding that she loves to cook and watch reality television cooking shows, although she admitted her favorite is “Cutthroat Kitchen.” “I think this is the first celebrity chef I’ve seen,” Tanusree said.

It wasn’t, she said hopefully, the last in her future career in hospitality or cooking.

Original Article and Photo Sourced From:  http://blog.sfgate.com/education/2014/10/09/top-chef-star-tom-colicchio-likes-what-he-tastes-in-sf-school-lunchroom/ 

California, Bay Area Housing Markets Nearly Stable, Says Freddie Mac

Over the past year, the U.S. real estate market has continued to stabilize, a Freddie Mac index says. That’s also true here in California and the Bay Area, with several of our local markets recovering faster than the nation.
Freddie Mac’s Multi-Indicator Market Index (MiMi) gauges housing stability by assessing four factors: home-purchase applications, payment-to-income ratios, the number of owners who are current on their mortgage payments, and employment rates. The MiMi then classifies a market as weak, stable, or elevated based on those criteria.

The latest MiMi data, which covers activity through July, gives the national housing market an index value of 73.4, still shy of the stable range of 80 to 120. The U.S. market  trended up over the previous year, with a gain of 5.4 percent on the MiMi scale. According to the index’s historical data, the U.S. housing market was last in the stable range in November 2008.

The MiMi gives California’s real estate market an index value of 77.5, up 9.1 percent from a year ago. The statewide market was last in MiMi’s stable range in August 2008. Freddie Mac’s statistics show that payment-to-income ratios and employment levels have both stabilized in California, with respective index values of 98.3 and 95.3.

Freddie Mac’s index also breaks out data for the 50 largest metro areas in the U.S., including San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara.

With an index value of 78.4, San Francisco is the closest of the California regions still in the index’s weak range to achieving stability. Currently, the only California region that Freddie Mac deems stable is Los Angeles.

San Francisco’s index value increased 7.8 percent on an annual basis. As is true across the state, San Francisco received stable scores for payment-to-income ratios (100.5) and employment rates (96.8). However, purchase applications were a weak spot, with an index value of 38.9, much lower than the national average.

The San Jose housing market is also headed toward firmer ground, with an index value of 75.5, up 6.5 percent from a year earlier. San Jose ranked as stable for payment-to-income levels (84.3),  current mortgage payments (80.4), and jobs (99), but still has a weak amount of purchase applications (38.3).

The MiMi says that San Francisco and San Jose real estate markets were last in the stable range in August 2008.


(Photo: Flickr/Horla Varlan)

FBI Makes Animal Cruelty A Top-Tier Felony To Help Track Abuse

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Young people who torture and kill animals are prone to violence against people later in life if it goes unchecked, studies have shown. A new federal category for animal cruelty crimes will help root out those pet abusers before their behavior worsens and give a boost to prosecutions, an animal welfare group says.

For years, the FBI has filed animal abuse under the label "other" along with a variety of lesser crimes, making cruelty hard to find, hard to count and hard to track. The bureau announced this month that it would make animal cruelty a Group A felony with its own category — the same way crimes like homicide, arson and assault are listed.

"It will help get better sentences, sway juries and make for better plea bargains," said Madeline Bernstein, president and CEO of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles and a former New York prosecutor.


The category also will help identify young offenders, and a defendant might realize "if he gets help now, he won't turn into Jeffrey Dahmer," she said.


Law enforcement agencies will have to report incidents and arrests in four areas: simple or gross neglect; intentional abuse and torture; organized abuse, including dogfighting and cockfighting; and animal sexual abuse, the FBI said in statement. The bureau didn't answer questions beyond a short statement.


"The immediate benefit is it will be in front of law enforcement every month when they have to do their crime reports," said John Thompson, interim executive director of the National Sheriffs' Association who worked to get the new animal cruelty category instituted. "That's something we have never seen."


Officers will start to see the data are facts and "not just somebody saying the 'Son of Sam' killed animals before he went to human victims and 70-some percent of the school shooters abused animals prior to doing their acts before people," said Thompson, a retired assistant sheriff from Prince George's County, Maryland.


FBI studies show that serial killers like Dahmer impaled the heads of dogs, frogs and cats on sticks; David Berkowitz, known as the "Son of Sam," poisoned his mother's parakeet; and Albert DeSalvo, aka the "Boston Strangler," trapped cats and dogs in wooden crates and killed them by shooting arrows through the boxes.


It will take time and money to update FBI and law enforcement databases nationwide, revise manuals and send out guidelines, Thompson said, so there won't be any data collected until January 2016. After that, it will take several months before there are numbers to analyze.


The new animal cruelty statistics will allow police and counselors to work with children who show early signs of trouble, so a preschooler hurting animals today isn't going to be hurting a person two years from now, Bernstein said.


The FBI's category will track crimes nationwide and is bound to give animal cruelty laws in all 50 states more clout. Many states are seeing more of those convicted of animal cruelty being sentenced to prison, in marked contrast to years past.


Whether talking about state laws or the FBI change, it is clear "that regardless of whether people care about how animals are treated, people — like legislators and judges — care about humans, and they can't deny the data," said Natasha Dolezal, director of the animal law program in the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.



Online:

— National Sheriffs' Association: www.sheriffs.org

— Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles: www.spcala.com

— Center for Animal Law Studies: law.lclark.edu/centers/animal_law_studies

Article and Photos Sourced From:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/01/fbi-animal-cruelty-felony_n_5913364.html 

San Francisco Metro Area Still Posting Double-Digit Percent Annual Home Price Gains

The San Francisco metro area is one of just three major U.S. regions where year-over-year home prices are still growing by double-digit percentage points, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices.
S&P/Case-Shiller’s data says that annual home prices in the San Francisco region increased by 10.3 percent in July, the third-largest gains of the 20 major U.S. metro areas included in the index. Across the index’s 20-city composite, home prices grew by 6.7 percent from July 2013.
Still, the rate of annual appreciation in the San Francisco metro area has slowed significantly since earlier in the year; as recently as March, home prices in the region were up year over year by more than 20 percent as measured by the index.
San Francisco was also the only metro area included in the 20-city composite to post a monthly decline from June to July, with home prices falling by 0.4 percent.
“At the bottom was San Francisco with its first decline this year and the only city in the red,” David M. Blitzer, chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices, said in a statement. The report notes that July’s month-over-month price drop was the largest recorded in the region since February 2012.
A look at MLS data reveals that the median single-family home price increased in every one of Pacific Union’s Bay Area regions year over year in July. Annual home price gains were largest in Sonoma Valley, up 41 percent from July 2013. At $750,000, Sonoma Valley’s July median sales price reached a two-year high.
Home price growth across our other regions ranged from 25 percent in San Francisco to 4 percent in Marin County.


(Photo: Flickr/Andrew_Writer)

 

The newly relocated Marlowe opens Thursday in SoMa

Thursday is opening day for the new version of Marlowe.

The Marlowe team — led by Anna Weinberg, Jennifer Puccio and James Nicholas — closed their little Townsend Street restaurant two weeks ago, and shipped everything a few blocks away to the former address of Coco500.

Marlowe 2.0 features double the number of seats as its original version, jumping from 40 to 80. The other major changes are the new patio with room for 15-20 seats and a full liquor license, which allows for cocktails. And don’t forget: Emily Luchetti is on desserts at Marlowe, as well as at sister restaurants Park Tavern and the Cavalier. And despite the new location, Marlowe regulars will recognize plenty about the look and feel of the place (not to mention the menu), as designer Ken Fulk carried over plenty from Townsend Street.

Hours to start:

• Lunch (starting 10/6): Monday to Friday, 11:30am to 2:30pm.
• Dinner: Nightly, 5:30pm-10pm and until 11pm on Thursday to Saturday. Bar open with limited menu on weekday afternoons between lunch and dinner.

http://marlowesf.com/ 

Artile and Photos Sourced From:  http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2014/10/01/the-newly-relocated-marlowe-opens-thursday-in-soma/#27189-3 

Failing to Refinance at Low Rates Could Cost You Thousands of Dollars

File this story under “Woulda, coulda, shoulda.”

In December 2010, 20 percent of U.S. homeowners could have refinanced their mortgages and saved an average of $45,000 each over the life of their loans, but they failed to do so.

The National Bureau of Economic Research analyzed 1 million fixed-rate mortgages from that month and estimated that, in all, millions of Americans with fixed-rate mortgages failed to take advantage of money-saving refinancing opportunities that month, when interest rates hovered near record lows. 

Some homeowners later said they were unaware of the potential savings from refinancing or were unwilling to follow through on the necessary paperwork, according to an article in The Washington Post. Some said they simply failed to open mail that offered once-in-a-lifetime refinacing deals.

Even more amazing than the behavior of homeowners in December 2010 is that fact that interest rates today are lower than they were back then: Freddie Mac reported Thursday that current 30-year fixed-rate mortgages averaged  4.19 percent — lower than the average 4.3 percent in December 2010 and close to the record low of 3.31 percent set in November 2012.

Still some homeowners today are still nervous about refinancing, even when it can save them thousands of dollars.

Andrew Celis, who teaches financial literacy classes at Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, told the Post that some homeowners don’t refinance because they’re afraid that making changes will jeopardize their mortgage.

“A lot of homeowners that we communicate with on this issue sort of have just held their eyes to the ground, and have said, ‘I’m going to do whatever I need to do to make my payments monthly,’ ” Celis said.

Today’s low interest rates won’t last forever, however. It’s worth remembering that the average interest rate on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage in the 1990s averaged 8.12 percent, and in October 1981, mortgage rates peaked at more than 18 percent.

(Image: Flickr/Mark Moz)

Animal rescue will airlift 500 dogs from California to Northwest

An animal rescue group is gearing up for a massive airlift this weekend, flying more than 500 dogs facing euthanasia in California to rescue groups in the Northwest.

The operation, the largest to date for Wings of Rescue, aims to save dogs from death row in California, where hundreds of thousands of animals are killed every year.

"When you know what's going on, it's difficult to stay passive," said Yehuda Netanel, a private pilot and co-founder of Wings of Rescue.

This is the group's fourth holiday airlift, which started in 2010 with Netanel flying dogs to Hillsboro in his own Piper Malibu Jetprop. This year, he's corralled more than 20 pilots, who will airlift dogs to 14 destinations in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.

The flights were originally scheduled for Friday, but harsh weather forced Netanel to juggle schedules, with the first plane scheduled to land in Klamath Falls on Thursday. The Eugene and North Bend flights were shifted to Saturday. All of the other flights, including to Redmond and Hillsboro in Oregon, are scheduled for Friday.

Last year, seven planes flew 350 dogs to Hillsboro. This year, Wings of Rescue is flying 55 dogs to Hillsboro, eight to Redmond, 35 to Eugene, 20 to Klamath Falls and a small number to North Bend.
The rest of the canines --€“ more than 500 altogether -- will go to rescue groups in Seattle, Bellingham, Spokane, Pasco, Olympia, Kalispell, Billings, Helena and Boise.

Netanel said Wings of Rescue in the future aims to fly dogs beyond the Northwest.
"Not only are the destinations expanding, but we're finding humane societies in smaller towns where people are clamoring for dogs," said Netanel. "This is a golden opportunity for those dogs to have a life rather than being euthanized here."

A mix of dogs is scheduled to be flown to rescue groups in Oregon, including Family Dogs New Life Shelter in Portland, Oregon Dog Rescue in Tualatin, SaveHaven Humane Society in Albany, Love-a-Bull in Eugene, Willamette Humane Society in Salem and S/Nipped in Coos Bay.
The Hillsboro flights are scheduled to land between 3 and 4 p.m.

Outside Oregon, Netanel said some locations are only taking Chihuahuas, a breed that Netanel said was on the top of the euthanasia list in California.

So many unsprayed or neutered Chihuahuas are in California that people abandon them on city streets, ditch them in the countryside and dump them in the desert.

Most of the dogs slated for the airlift are now at shelters in Pasadena, Lancaster and Riverside. They're picked out by the receiving rescues, which select animals by looking at their profiles online, mainly PetFinder.com. On the days of the flights, volunteers in California will fetch them from shelters and drive them to the airport, where they're loaded in their own crates onto the aircraft.
About 200 people are taking part in the operation, which will cost about $100,000. Netanel said some money is coming from Wings of Rescue, a 501(c)3. But mostly the volunteer pilots are covering their own costs, including using their own aircraft.

He expects all of the animals to find homes.
"Holiday season is traditionally the time when people adopt dogs," Netanel said. "The vast majority will be adopted very quickly."
-- Lynne Terry

Article and Photos sourced From:  http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2013/12/animal_rescue_will_airlift_500.html