Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislative leaders agreed Tuesday on a proposal that requires employers to provide workers with up to two weeks of paid time off if they get sick from the coronavirus or need to care for an infected family member. Business groups opposed the benefit, saying it would be prohibitively costly. To help, the leaders planned $6 billion in tax breaks and other assistance for employers. A.P. | N.Y. Times

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday that she would seek another term, ending months of speculation about whether the 81-year-old would retire. “Our democracy is at risk,” the San Francisco Democrat said in a video message, alluding to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and former President Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. Her video made no mention of whether she would honor her 2018 commitment to relinquish her role as speaker. Mercury News | Washington Post

The primary challenge of water in California is that most of it isn’t where the people are. Solving that problem has involved replumbing the state, conveying water through deserts, across valleys, and over mountains. Digital wizards created a California water and drought tracker that visualizes the story, and it’s pretty fantastic. CalMatters

U.S. Drought Monitor: Since October, areas of “extreme drought” or worse have fallen from 87% of California to 1%.

Biologists announced the final tally of Western monarch butterflies overwintering in California: 247,237, a hundredfold increase from the prior season. Emma Pelton, of the Xerces Society, said conservationists were “ecstatic,” but also noted that the number remains far below the millions seen in the 1980s. The reason for the latest rebound was unclear. The Tribune | A.P.

Save the Redwoods League announced that it is transferring 523 acres of wilderness along the Lost Coast to the descendants of Native American tribes that lived there for thousands of years. A group of 10 tribes will steward the property now known as Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ, or “fish run place” in the Sinkyone language, including towering old-growth redwoods and a meandering creek. S.F. Chronicle | A.P.

San Jose on Tuesday became the nation’s first city to mandate that gun owners carry liability insurance. Mayor Sam Liccardo first proposed the measure in 2019 after a deadly shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Another gun rampage at a rail yard last summer added momentum to the effort. The City Council also voted to impose a yearly $25 fee on gun owners. Gun rights groups vowed to sue, calling the measures unconstitutional. San Jose Spotlight | Mercury News

A Vietnamese American man who was beaten with a bat two years ago in San Francisco’s Chinatown sued the district attorney’s office over its handling of the case. Anh Lê, 69, said prosecutors violated his rights by failing to consult him as they allowed the suspect to plea down to a misdemeanor for what should have been a hate crime. His voice quivering, Lê called the attack “the most brutal, terrifying and humiliating experience of my life.” NBC Bay Area | KRON

Newly released police data showed that anti-Asian hate crimes in San Francisco rose from nine in 2020 to 60 in 2021, a more than sixfold increase. CBS SF | A.P.

Barry Bonds, arguably the greatest hitter in baseball history, was shut out of the Hall of Fame on Tuesday in his last year of eligibility for the honor. While most of voting members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America believed the Giants great deserved the honor, enough of them felt his ties to performance-enhancing drugs disqualified him. S.F. Chronicle | Mercury News

A sampling of reactions:

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A sports historian shared a video that illustrated how dangerous Bonds was at bat: In 1998, with the game on the line and the bases loaded, he was intentionally walked. 👉 @readjack (~2 mins)

There was a time in San Francisco when you could theoretically have spotted Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Lange, and Maynard Dixon chatting at an Italian restaurant about art and politics of the day. A friendship between the two couples blossomed when the Mexican artists lived for a time in San Francisco in the early 1930s. KQED told the story of how the city gave Rivera and Kahlo a platform to thrive, and in return they “gave San Francisco a lasting blueprint for creativity.”

Before his death in 2017, Hugh Hefner portrayed his life’s work as revolutionizing American attitudes toward sex. But in a new docuseries, “Secrets of Playboy,” former girlfriends said Hefner fostered a “cult-like” atmosphere at his Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, where for decades young women were plied with drugs and pressured into sex. “This wasn’t about empowerment of women,” said Jennifer Saginor, the daughter of Hefner’s doctor. “It was the breaking down of a woman.” Washington Post | BBC

In 2017, fans were deeply wounded by the Chargers’ departure for Los Angeles after more than a half-century in San Diego. Now two former San Diego city attorneys have filed a lawsuit on behalf of a taxpayer against the NFL, accusing the league of violating its own rules about team relocations. The legal argument relies on evidence that owner Dean Spanos misled the city to believe the team could be convinced to stay even though he made up his mind to move as early as 2006. Axios | City News Service

Interest in home births soared during the pandemic. The photographer Maggie Shannon shadowed four Los Angeles midwives with her camera to document how childbirth looked like in a time of fear and uncertainty. Her powerful black-and-white series “Extreme Pain, but Also Extreme Joy” has been honored with several awards. Lens Culture | N.Y. Times