What segment of California’s population is healthiest?  It’s probably not what you would think.

As Alameda County’s Public Health Officer, Dr. Anthony Iton (left) directed efforts to correlate data from death certificates, parole offices, income reports from the national census and other sources and see where they overlapped in his county. And he found a high correspondence to the areas where poverty is most prevalent.

Taking their cue from the social support systems that many immigrant families enjoy, Dr. Iton suggests that public health departments also instigate informal gatherings of residents in impoverished neighborhoods, as an additional tool for improving their collective well-being.

Dr.  Iton  also co-authored this report (pdf, 87 pages) detailing the relative medical and social factors that shape health outcomes among the population of Alameda County. Similar results apply in Sonoma County and much of California.

Another drought-fueled fire season is underway across northern California, when any passing storms are more likely to bring blaze-sparking lightning strikes than enough rain to ease the danger.

CalFire maintains a frequently updated online map of all active fire incidents throughout the state, and you can see it here.

California’s annual Campaign Against Marijuana Planting is underway again, and so is the debate over its effectiveness.

The photograph above was taken at a CAMP raid in Shasta County, which has become the county where the state marijuana eradication program is now most active. Sonoma County ranks sixth.

CAMP is a project of the California Attorney General's Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. Spokeswoman Michelle Gregory says an increasing number of the pot growing operations they find are in hard-to-reach areas of the state. But not all of them.

Aaron Smith is the California Policy Director for the national Marijuana Policy Project. He says the state’s aggressive attempts to reduce marijuana growing have actually contributed to the spread of new and better financed farms into remote public lands in California.

Marijuana advocates have for years claimed that pot is California's biggest crop, and now cite govenment figures to support that claim. CAMP spokeswoman Gregory affirmed that much of California's cannabis is exported to other states. Surprisingly, Tennessee is reportedly the second leading pot producing state, far behind California.

The two tables below, as well as the graph above, are taken from the CAMP website.

Below, some of the marijuana plants shown in the earlier picture are loaded onto trucks to be taken away and destroyed. Photographs from the San Francisco Chronicle.

A new plan to bring baseball back to the North Bay envisions a short summer league with a dozen teams of mostly local players, and a rolling set-up to dress up existing ball fields in area parks.

The proposed Wine Country Old Fashioned Baseball League is the idea of Dry Creek Valley winery owner Howard Leonhardt (left), who says he developed it after he was unable to purchase an existing minor league team and relocate it to Sonoma County.