By MATTHAI KURUVILA, San Francisco Chronicle

SAN FRANCISCO - As California prepares to shift responsibility for incarcerating delinquent teens to its counties, local agencies have serious questions about their ability to take on the burden.

OAKLAND, Calif. - Oakland's City Council has embraced regulations permitting industrial-scale medical marijuana farms, a plan that some small farmers argued would squeeze them out of the industry they helped to build.

To address concerns from smaller farmers, the council pledged Tuesday to create rules on regulating small- and medium-size marijuana farms this year.

SAN FRANCISCO - With their pregnant mother screaming in pain, two young California children calmly called their father and then called 911. They delivered a baby brother.

Faith and Jabari Sanders are only 11 and 9 years old. They thought it was cool.

OAKLAND, Calif. - Call it the Wal-Mart of weed.

In a 15,000-square-foot warehouse just down the road from the Oakland Airport, an entrepreneur is opening a one-stop shop for medicinal-marijuana cultivation that's believed to be the largest in the state.

Berkeley may take great pride as a champion of free speech and civil rights, but an unusual campaign has been under way -- led by most of the city's top elected officials -- to stop residents from signing a citizen's petition.

A petition organized by a nonprofit urging Muslims to limit social outreach with the FBI has provoked a national debate within the Muslim community about how to deal with law enforcement.

Unemployed for a year and with an ailing wife at home, Mike Hammer stepped out of his truck in a Concord, Calif. strip mall and walked into the heart of one of the most sophisticated private welfare systems in the country.

Unemployed for a year and with an ailing wife at home, Mike Hammer stepped out of his truck in a Concord, Calif. strip mall and walked into the heart of one of the most sophisticated private welfare systems in the country.

As credit markets have imploded, triggering a global economic crisis, Islamically correct investors have seen a change of fortune: The conservative principles this small group of devout Muslims clung to during the economic heyday has insulated them from the worst of the past year's suffering.

Months before the first ads ran on Proposition 8, San Francisco Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer reached out to a group he knew well, Mormons.