Madera Ca

You would never mistake Jesse Lopez Jr. for a revolutionary. Soft-spoken, with a shy smile beneath his gray mustache, the retired school custodian and amateur mariachi singer hardly seems like an instigator. Yet if Latinos come to dominate California politics someday, Lopez will have helped make it happen.

Firefighters estimated damage at nearly $1.5 million after a blaze swept through about 1,500 tons of cattle feed at a Madera silo. Officials spent most of Monday removing the smoldering feed and extinguishing hot spots. The fire was discovered last week when heat built up inside a Pacific Ethanol Inc. silo in Madera County. Firefighters flooded the silo with chemical foam for 12 hours to smother the blaze.

For the first time since the San Joaquin River chewed through the old levee on its north bank and sent its surging flood waters his way, farmer Pete Andrew was ready to call it a day. He had fought a maddening, 24-hour battle against a river that California agriculture had tamed for more than half a century.

It's been 30 years since the University of California opened its last campus, and it will probably be at least another decade before money is found to open the next. But that hasn't discouraged the boosters of the San Joaquin Valley. Since 1990, when the UC Board of Regents decided to put a 10th campus somewhere in the Central Valley, more than 80 communities have lobbied to get it built on their fertile ground. People from Frazier Valley printed up buttons that said, "We Support It!"