Just in time for the Fourth of July weekend, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s $19 million renovation, which includes a new one-million-gallon Open Sea exhibit, debuts July 2.
- San Leandro, not Alameda: After a woman drove her car into the bay near the marina, a police officer went into the water to help rescue her.
- Judging from Saturday’s big turnout, the city’s Gay Pride weekend appears to be unaffected by the non-profit San Francisco Pride Celebration Committee’s financial woes.
- What do the Chronicle, the Washington Post and Mountain View High School’s student newspaper, the Oracle, have in common? Each could have broken the Jose Antonio Vargas immigration story but didn’t.
- Guess it’s tough being the only female firefighter in Daly City. She’s filed a lawsuit claiming the department retaliated against her for complaining about the women’s restroom.
- Crazy media insult of the week: Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO turned GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain calls reporters “idiotic” for taking him seriously when he said that congressional bills should be limited to three pages.
- Not so fast: A day after dropping their appeal of a 2008 settlement with Mark Zuckerberg, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who claim he took their idea for Facebook while at Harvard, filed another lawsuit seeking a big slice of the Facebook fortune.
- To combat its image as a destination primarily for kids, San Jose’s Tech Museum will introduce a “happy hour” offering entertainment and cocktails for the over-21 crowd the first Wednesday of the month starting in July.
- The Chronicle takes an editorial stand against new graphic warnings on cigarette packs: “Some of the images are downright gruesome, such as the photo of a diseased lung and the rotted teeth with an open sore on the lip.”
- There’s now a hard target completion date for BART’s long-awaited 5.6-mile extension of the Fremont line to Warm Springs: November 2015.
- Measure of how coarse political dialogue has become: Radio talker Rush Limbaugh compares President Obama to Hitler and elicits little more than yawns.
- Sunday reads: The NYT’s Katharine Q. Seelye looks at the life of Irish Mafia moll and one-time dental hygienist Catherine Greig (pictured in the early ‘70s), loyal to former Alcatraz inmate Whitey Bulger until the end.
- And as long as you’re at it: “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” the aforementioned Jose Antonio Vargas’ revelatory New York Times Magazine piece at the heart of the week’s biggest media buzz.
- The five California condors who’ve taken up residence near the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton east of San Jose are so far getting along swimmingly with their turkey vulture neighbors.
- Cringe-worthy headline in the Contra Costa Times sure not to warm hearts in a certain crime-troubled East Bay city: “Father-daughter stabbing caps violent day in Richmond.”
- Gawker points out that MySpace founder Tom Anderson hasn’t updated his status in more than a year and adds, “Forget finding a buyer; MySpace would have trouble just getting adopted.”
