News that the Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants was welcome news to a group of undocumented students who spent the night at the president's Oakland campaign office to protest deportations. The students were were ecstatic Friday morning but apprehensive upon learning of the order.

San Francisco reduced the number of schools considered the worst of the worst in the state, according to rankings released Thursday. California's schools are ranked annually according to the state's Academic Performance Index, which is a composite of test scores from the previous spring. Thursday's rankings reflect students' performance from spring 2011 and give parents and real estate agents a simple way to compare schools and districts across the state.

For the past six months, as crews have begun preparing to dig a tunnel for the Central Subway, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and city transit officials have assured residents that the federal government will approve $942 million needed to pay for the project. But internal emails show that San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency officials are worried that if the Federal Transit Administration doesn't approve the funding by September, the cost to build the 1.7-mile subway could skyrocket.

Falling boulders are the single biggest force shaping Yosemite Valley, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the national park system. Now swaths of some popular haunts are closing for good after geologists confirmed that unsuspecting tourists and employees are being lodged in harm's way. On Thursday, the National Park Service announced that potential danger from the unstable 3,000-foot-tall Glacier Point, a granite promontory that for decades has provided a dramatic backdrop to park events, will leave some of the valley's most popular lodging areas permanently uninhabitable.

Many in the traditional auto industry doubted that Tesla Motors (TSLA) could build an all-electric sedan from scratch in Silicon Valley. But next week the skeptics will witness the tech industry's most disruptive product launch of the year. Tesla is counting down the hours to next Friday, when CEO Elon Musk will hand over the keys to a small group of customers who placed early reservations for the Model S sedan. It's a watershed moment for the Palo Alto-based company, manufacturing in California and the nascent electric vehicle industry, which has been struggling to live up to ambitious expectations.