Google is an American multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are derived from AdWords.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. Together they own about 14 percent of its shares but control 56 of the stockholder voting power through supervoting stock. They incorporated Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. Its mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil." In 2006 Google moved to headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. (more...)

Henderson also holds the single-season record for stolen bases (130 in 1982) and is the only player in AL history to steal 100 bases in a season, having done so three times. His 1,406 career steals is 50% higher than the previous record of 938 by Lou Brock. Henderson is the all-time stolen base leader for the Oakland A's and previously held the New York Yankees' franchise record from 1988 to 2011. He was among the league's top ten base stealers in 21 different seasons. (more...)

Walnut Creek is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States, located in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, about 16 miles (26 kilometres) east of the city of Oakland. With a total estimated population of 67,673, Walnut Creek serves as a hub for its neighboring cities because of its location at the junction of the highways from Sacramento and San Jose (I-680) and San Francisco/Oakland (SR-24) and its accessibility by BART. Its active downtown neighborhood features hundred-year-old buildings and extensive high-end retail establishments, restaurants and entertainment venues.

Walnut Creek owns more open space per capita than any other community in the state of California. In 1974, Walnut Creek voters approved a $6.7 million bond measure that allowed the city to purchase 1,800 acres (730 ha) of undeveloped hillsides, ridge lines, and park sites. Walnut Creek owns parts of Lime Ridge Open Space, Shell Ridge Open Space, Acalanes Ridge Open Space, and Sugarloaf Open Space. (more...)

• 
  February
  
  
  
  • The Berkeley City Council declares Berkeley a "sanctuary city" for recreational cannabis sales, prohibiting the use of city resources to assist in enforcing federal marijuana laws or providing information on legal cannabis sales, the first city in California to do so [1]
    
  
  
  • 
    Marin County is ranked worst among all California counties in racial disparity, according to Race Counts and Advancement Project California, with a spokesperson for the groups stating, "We were surprised, and were not expecting Marin to be the number-one county in terms of disparity...It’s not that progressive counties have it all figured out" [2]
    
  
  
  • 
    Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley announces that her office will review thousands of marijuana convictions, dating back to 1974, for possible dismissal under Proposition 64, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, guidelines, following closely after San Francisco announced a similar plan (above) [3]
    
  
  
  • Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf alerts city residents to imminent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, earning criticism from some federal authorities. She responds, "I was sharing information in a way that was legal and was not obstructing justice, and it was an opportunity to ensure that people were aware of their rights." [4]
    
  
  
  
  


• 
  March
  
  • A man with a rifle enters the Veterans Home of California Yountville, the largest veterans home in the United States, holds employees hostage, and is found dead, along with 3 hostages [5]
    
  
  


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  May
  
  
  
  • Two studies conclude that the housing crisis in the Bay Area and California is reaching emergency proportions, with one study estimating that two counties alone, Santa Clara and Alameda, will need more than 50,000 new homes to meet the demand for affordable housing for lower-income residents, while homelessness increased by 36% in Alameda County from 2016-2017[6]
    
  
  
  • The father of some of the ten children that were removed from a home in Fairfield, where they were living in conditions of severe neglect and abuse, is arrested and booked on seven counts of torture and nine counts of felony child abuse [7]
    
  
  
  • A nine-story electronic sculpture, "Day for Night", created by artist Jim Campbell, that features low resolution, abstract videos of San Francisco, debuts at the top of Salesforce Tower [8][9]
    
  
  
  
  


• 
  June
  
  
  
  • San Francisco voters pass an ordinance banning the sale of flavored tobacco products, due in part to concerns that candy-flavored products may lure teenagers into nicotine addiction [10]
    
  
  
  • 
    Santa Clara County voters remove Santa Clara County Superior Court judge Aaron Persky, who came to national attention in 2016 when he sentenced a Stanford University student to just six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman [11]
    
  
  
  • 
    London Breed (pictured) is elected Mayor of San Francisco in a special election, defeating close rival Mark Leno [12]
    
  
  
  • 
    Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, and former president and COO Ramesh Balwani are indicted on charges of wire fraud, accused of carrying out a multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors, doctors and patients. Theranos announced that Holmes would resign as CEO, but retain her position as chairwoman of the board [13]
    
  
  
  • 
    Hanabiko "Koko", a female western lowland gorilla born at the San Francisco Zoo, who was known for having learned a large number of hand signs from a modified version of American Sign Language. dies at her home in Woodside, California [14]
    
  
  
  
  


• 
  July
  
  
  
  • The West County Detention Center severs ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and will no longer incarcerate undocumented migrants at the Contra Costa County facility. [15]
    
  
  
  • 
    Nia Wilson, an African American woman, is killed while exiting MacArthur BART station, when a white male attacked her and one of her two sisters with her, with strong suspicions that this was a racially motivated hate crime [16]
    
  
  
  • 
    Ron Dellums (pictured), former East Bay US Representative and mayor of Oakland, known for his fiery anti-Vietnam War oratory and progressive politics, dies at his home in Washington, D.C. [17][18]
    
  
  
  
  


• 
  August
  
  
  
  • 
    Apple Inc becomes the first company in history to reach $1,000,000,000,000 in value [19]
    
  
  
  • The Transbay Transit Center opens in San Francisco, initially as a hub for bus lines including MUNI and AC Transit, and eventually nearly a dozen other transit agencies, including BART and CalTrain [20]
    
  
  
  • A study by the California Association of Realtors shows that only about 1 in 5 Bay Area residents can afford the median purchase price for a home, with state home affordability rates at a 10 year low [21]
    
  
  
  • A jury in San Francisco awards 46-year-old former school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson US$289m in damages against Monsanto, after alleging that it had spent decades hiding the cancer-causing dangers of its Roundup herbicides [22]
    
  
  
  
  


• 
  September
  
  
  
  • The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upholds a patent filed by the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University involving Crispr Cas-9 gene-editing, ruling that the patent didn’t infringe on another patent filed two years prior by the University of California, Berkeley, where the technique was first developed [23]
    
  
  
  • The Global Climate Action Summit convenes in San Francisco, hosted by California governor Jerry Brown, who pledges to uphold state environmental guidelines despite moves by the United States to roll them back [24]
    
  
  
  • San Francisco businessman and co-founder of Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, and his wife, Lynn Benioff, purchase Time magazine for $190 million [25]
    
  
  
  • Psychologist and Palo Alto University statistics professor Christine Blasey Ford accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in 1982 [26]
    
  
  
  
  

• 30 inches (76 cm) of snow falls on Mount Hamilton (pictured)
  


• The collapse of the Dot-com bubble accelerates


• 
  City Lights Bookstore is declared a San Francisco Designated Landmark
  


• 
  Michael Chabon's 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  


• 
  Apple, Inc. releases iTunes, and later in the year introduces the iPod