Rohnert Park police are investigating an alleged kidnapping that  lead to a seven-hour standoff Friday morning at a Motel 6. Miles Minoletti, 21, said on his Facebook page around 2 a.m. Friday that he had been kidnapped and was being held hostage by his father, Martin  Minoletti, in a room at a Motel 6 in Rohnert Park, Department of Public  Safety Lt. Jeff Taylor said.

San Francisco is joining a group of other California cities and  public utilities in a lawsuit to remove a statewide ballot measure they say  misleads voters about its true intentions to doom public power. Proposition 16, a constitutional amendment on the June 8 statewide  ballot, would require a two-thirds majority vote before local jurisdictions  could establish a public power program, known as community choice  aggregation, to compete with private utilities.

Patients, growers and clinics in some of the 14 states that allow medical marijuana are increasingly falling victim to robberies, home invasions, shootings and even murders at the hands of pot thieves. There have been dozens of cases in recent months alone.

California community college students have missed out on as much as $500 million in unclaimed federal aid, according to a recent report. Wednesday's report by the nonprofit Institute for College Access and Success in Berkeley found that about 500,000 of the 2.9 million community college students in California could be eligible for a Pell Grant.

Despite a modest rise last month, Bay Area home sales continue to stagnate, according to the latest figures released by San Diego-based real estate analysts MDA DataQuick. The report said 4,987 new and resale homes were sold in the nine-county Bay Area in February, up 2.8 percent from January but down 0.9 percent from the same time last year.

Prosecutors allege a Northern California man molested two women in his care at a center for the developmentally disabled. According to court documents, Curtis Cortez of Benicia faces seven felony counts of lewd and lascivious acts by a caretaker upon a dependent person. The alleged misconduct took place while the 59-year-old Cortez worked for San Rafael-based Cedars of Marin as a program instructor. He has since resigned.

Thursday afternoon's scheduled arraignment of San Rafael murder suspect Richard Leroy Carlson in Marin County Superior Court has been postponed.     Carlson, 30, is scheduled to be arraigned at 1:30 p.m. on March 24 for the murder of his 72-year-old mother Eleanor Carlson in her home at 215 C St. in San Rafael on or around March 15.

Police say they've identified a man believed to have shot a 29-year-old Fairfield resident in the leg after the two got in an argument at a bar last week. Just before 2 a.m. on March 8, the victim reportedly began arguing with a man at Harry's Sportsman Lounge at 833 Texas St., Fairfield police said. The two left the bar and continued their argument outside, where the suspect allegedly went to the cab of his truck and retrieved a handgun.

Marin County District Attorney Ed Berberian says he will not seek the death penalty for two men charged with the murder of a San Francisco business owner in the garage of his Novato home in 2008. The decision applies to Larry Blay Jr., 20, and Sean Demetrius  Washington, 23, both of San Francisco, who were indicted along with three  juveniles on June 12 for the shooting murder of Tong Van Le as he sat in his  car on Sept. 13, 2008.

PG&E is identifying the worker who was electrocuted on the job in Benicia Wednesday morning as 26-year-old Max Martinez. Utility spokesperson Katie Romans says Martinez was a general construction lineman who worked out of PG&E’s Calistoga yard in Napa County. She did not know where he lived.