Newsom says California could get mandatory water restrictions as drought crisis deepens
The Chronicle, KATE GALBRAITH: “Gov. Gavin Newsom warned Monday that California could see mandatory water restrictions if significant cutbacks in water usage are not made by summer.
Last July, Newsom called for a 15% reduction in the amount of water Californians use. But the state has come nowhere near to meeting that target — savings are at less than 4% since Newsom issued the request.
And usage has crept up during the spring months, when little rain fell. In March, for example, statewide water usage increased by nearly 19% compared with the same month in 2020.”
‘Everyone loses’: Sacramento Valley struggles to survive unprecedented water cuts
CALMatters, RACHEL BECKER: “Standing on the grassy plateau where water is piped onto his property, Josh Davy wished his feet were wet and his irrigation ditch full.
Three years ago, when he sank everything he had into 66 acres of irrigated pasture in Shasta County, Davy thought he’d drought-proofed his cattle operation.
He’d been banking on the Sacramento Valley’s water supply, which was guaranteed even during the deepest of droughts almost 60 years ago, when irrigation districts up and down the valley cut a deal with the federal government. Buying this land was his insurance against droughts expected to intensify with climate change.”
SoCal drought battle: Keeping trees alive despite unprecedented watering restrictions
LA Times, JAIMIE DING: “The lowly sidewalk tree often stands invisible. We rest in its shade, bask in the scent of springtime flowers, and we don’t notice it until it’s gone.
But the tree works hard. It captures and filters stormwater runoff and helps replenish groundwater. It cleans our air and cools our neighborhoods. It improves our mental health. It saves lives.
With Southern California officials clamping down on outdoor water use amid worsening drought, the message is clear: It’s fine for lawns to go brown, but we need to keep trees alive and healthy.”
Newsom signs compromise law raising the limit on medical malpractice damages
BOB EGELKO, Chronicle: "California's $250,000 limit on damages for pain and suffering caused by medical malpractice, a ceiling enacted by lawmakers in 1975 at the insistence of doctors and insurers, will be lifted next year.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed compromise legislation Monday, sponsored by consumer advocates and supported by medical groups, that will not remove all limits on malpractice damages but will raise them to account for some of the inflation in the past 47 years.
Under AB35 by Assembly Majority Leader Eloise Gómez Reyes, D-Colton (San Bernardino County), the new limits for noneconomic damages in 2023 will be $350,000 for nonfatal medical malpractice by a physician and $500,000 for malpractice causing death. The maximum will rise gradually over the next decade, to $750,000 for non-death cases and $1 million for fatal cases, and increase by 2% a year thereafter for inflation."
Will a Trump endorsement help a Democrat win this California congressional seat?
DAVID LIGHTMAN, SacBee: "Donald Trump is now officially a factor in the Kermit Jones-Kevin Kiley-Scott Jones race for Congress.
And while Trump’s endorsement of Kiley earlier this month means Kermit Jones has a highly useful new foil, it’s still going to be a tough race for the Democrat in this Republican-leaning district, analysts said. Trump “gives Jones an ability to raise money and raise his profile at a national level,” said Sacramento-based Democratic consultant Andrew Acosta.
But, he added, for Democrats, “it’s a tough seat.”
SEIU California notches election win on CalPERS board with $240,000 in spending
WES VENTEICHER, SacBee: "A candidate backed by the Service Employees International Union has won election to the CalPERS board, marking the third victory by an SEIU-backed candidate in less than a year.
Mullissa Willette, 39, a tax exemption investigator with the Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office, won by a sizable margin with support from several branches of the powerful public employees’ union, according to unofficial CalPERS election results.
Willette received 62% of the vote, defeating Richard Fuentes, a Bay Area Rapid Transit special projects manager, according to CalPERS results posted online last week. Current employees of local governments with CalPERS-administered benefits could vote in the election, and 12,990 of them did so.
Cause of light rail crash that injured two dozen Sacramento riders detailed in NTSB report
ALEXANDRA YOON-HENDRICKS, SacBee: "Sacramento Regional Transit’s “weak administrative controls” was the likely cause of the light rail crash that injured more than two dozen people, federal investigators concluded.
In its final report, the National Transportation Safety Board found the collision between a two-car passenger train and a one-car maintenance train Aug. 22, 2019, occurred because senior RT management failed “to assess a transportation supervisor’s competency in the combined role as both the controller and dispatcher on the evening shift.”
The crash occurred about 9:38 p.m. on a remote stretch of the Blue Line near North Sacramento’s Hagginwood neighborhood when an RT train with 24 occupants collided head-on at 32 mph with a stopped test train with three occupants."
California lawmakers take on Texas by blocking ‘heartbeat’ abortion laws
LA Times, MACKENZIE MAYS: “A proposal that cleared the California Assembly on Monday seeks to guard against so-called fetal heartbeat laws and abortion restrictions imposed by other states amid uncertainty over the landmark ruling in Roe vs. Wade.
The bill reinforces California’s pro-abortion rights status as federal protections are in jeopardy and after Texas and almost a dozen other states have passed laws to ban the procedure as early as the sixth week of pregnancy.
Texas law allows civil lawsuits to be filed against abortion providers or anyone who otherwise “aids or abets” a person receiving an abortion after a heartbeat has been detected — a hard-to-define timeline that significantly limits abortion access.”
Anaheim mayor resigns amid corruption probe into his role in Angel Stadium land sale
LA Times, NATHAN FENNO/SEEMA MEHTA/ADAM ELMAHREK/GABRIEL SAN ROMÁN: “Two prominent Orange County political leaders resigned within 24 hours of each other amid fallout from a sprawling federal public corruption investigation linked to the proposed sale of Angel Stadium and allegations that a secretive “cabal” controlled Anaheim’s politics.
Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu announced Monday that he was stepping down after being accused of bribery, fraud, obstruction of justice and witness tampering in an affidavit supporting a search warrant application earlier this month.
The announcement in a two-paragraph statement from his attorney came after another prominent figure caught up in the probe, Melahat Rafiei, announced she was stepping down as a member of the Democratic National Committee and state party secretary.”
The Chronicle, RACHEL SWAN: “Mayor London Breed announced Monday that she will join San Francisco’s public safety agencies in skipping the Pride Parade this year, unless the event’s organizers reverse a controversial ban on law enforcement uniforms.
“I’ve made this very hard decision in order to support those members of the LGBTQ community who serve in uniform, in our Police Department and Sheriff’s Department, who have been told they cannot march in uniform and in support of the members of the Fire Department who are refusing to march out of solidarity with their public safety partners,” Breed wrote in a statement.
Supervisor Matt Dorsey said he will also forgo this year’s parade “so long as the exclusionary policy remains in effect.” Breed picked Dorsey two weeks ago to fill the vacant board seat for District Six, comprising the SoMa and Mission Bay neighborhoods. Until his appointment, Dorsey served as a top spokesperson for the Police Department.”
Kevin McCarthy claims Biden rarely takes his calls. What does it mean if the House flips?
LA Times, JENNIFER HABERKORN: “As the United States hastily exited Afghanistan last year, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy dialed up the White House’s public switchboard number to lodge his anger over the messy withdrawal.
The Bakersfield Republican got a quizzical call back from a White House staffer who wanted to know if it was actually him who left a message, according to McCarthy’s retelling during a record-long House floor speech in November. President Biden followed up with a call, in which the two men clashed over the last Americans left in the country as the U.S.’s longest war ended.
It was the only publicly known one-on-one call during the first 16 months of the Biden administration between the president and the man who could be speaker of the House next year, political rivals who would be part of the small cadre of elected leaders responsible for keeping the government funded and avoiding a catastrophic default on the nation’s debt.”
Congestion pricing? Free buses? Monorails? How L.A.’s next mayor could change your commute
LA Times, RACHEL URANGA: “Free and faster buses. Monorails. Streetcars in places like Hollywood and Koreatown. Staggered work schedules. Less traffic?
The next mayor could radically change how Angelenos move through traffic-choked streets and highways. Not only will the person be charged with framing the city’s near $12-billion budget, where funds for fixed potholes and crosswalks come from, but the mayor will also control four seats on the 13-member board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Agency.
The agency, with its nearly $9-billion budget, decides how often buses run, where rails are built and how much it costs to get on them.
The city may be the nation’s capital of car culture, but pressure is building to get more people out of their emission-spewing rides. The next mayor will grapple with issues like whether to widen freeways or implement congestion pricing. And as new ways to move emerge, that person will likely make decisions about air taxis, delivery robots and even a gondola to Dodger Stadium.”
Pelosi suggests hypocrisy, ulterior motives in archbishop’s feud over abortion
The Chronicle, TAL KAPAN: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made her first public comments Tuesday on the San Francisco archibishop’s decision last week to deny her Communion, suggesting he and other anti-abortion activists had ulterior motives and were ignoring other parts of Catholicism.
The San Francisco Democrat said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday that she respects the views of those who do not believe in abortion, like many in her Catholic family. “But I don’t respect us foisting it onto others,” she said.
She noted that Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has not denied Communion to political officials over other issues anathema to Catholic teachings.”
Q&A: Student loan forgiveness unlikely to boost the economy
LA Times, DON LEE: “The Biden administration has been considering a plan to cancel at least $10,000 of federal student-loan debt. President Biden promised something of the sort during the 2020 presidential campaign. And with about 45 million current and former students carrying $1.76 trillion in debt, some sort of debt forgiveness is appealing both as policy and as politics.
But what kind of debt forgiveness, and how much for whom?
What makes that a hard question is that there is not one student debt problem; there are dozens. They range from mega-loans for Harvard Business School degrees that yield Wall Street jobs with mega-salaries to much smaller amounts borrowed to pay for vocational training that proved almost worthless, if not an outright scam.”
The Chronicle, SUSIE NEILSON: “San Francisco is the most childless major city in the U.S. Just 13% of the city’s population is under 18, a figure that’s less than Los Angeles, Seattle or even New York City.
But in a handful of the city’s neighborhoods, the share of children is under 10% — particularly in wealthier neighborhoods in the city’s northeast section that are hotspots for high-earning young professionals.
The Chronicle analyzed data from the 2020 Decennial Census on the share of people under 18 years old in each San Francisco neigccchborhood. The data shows that neighborhoods including Nob Hill, SoMa and Russian Hill have a smaller share of kids than even the city’s low 13% median.”
The Chroniole, JESSICA FLORES: “An East Bay high school on Tuesday will grant honorary diplomas to 40 former students who were forced out of school and incarcerated in internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.
The effort at Mount Diablo High in Concord was part of a yearlong student project that involved digging through the school’s 1942 yearbook and reaching out to the descendants of the students who were forced to leave, said ethnic studies teacher Laura Valdez, who led the project with Kimiyo Tahira Dowell, a class of 1958 alumna. In response to the surge of anti-Asian violence over the past few years, Dowell, Valdez and a group of students presented the project to the district’s board, which unanimously approved the proposal at its March 23 meeting.
Eighty years ago, in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued a mandate — Executive Order 9066 — that prohibited people of Japanese descent from living in the U.S. West Coast. The order led to the incarceration of thousands of Bay Area residents at internment camps in California and across the country.”
How language-rich math can help students learning English
EdSource, ZAIDEE STAVELY: “When Nicole Thompson teaches a math word problem to her fourth grade class in Pajaro Valley Unified, she has the class read it over three times.
After the first read, students discuss with a partner what the situation is that’s described in the word problem. The second time, they discuss what numbers they see and what those numbers mean. The third time, they talk about the question and what they need to solve.
Thompson said the strategy really helps her students, especially those for whom English is a second language.”
This bacterial disease can be deadly for your pet. UC Davis is using AI to catch it early
Sac Bee, HANH TRUONG: “Veterinarians and researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a new way to detect leptospirosis, a life-threatening bacterial disease, in dogs using artificial intelligence.
Leptospirosis is caused by the Leptospira bacteria, according to American Veterinary Medical Association, and it is typically found in soil and water. Infection in dogs can result in kidney failure, liver disease and bleeding in the lungs, with early detection being a matter of life or death, UC Davis said in a news release.
“Traditional testing for Leptospira lacks sensitivity early in the disease process,” said Krystle Reagan, lead author of the study and a board-certified internal medicine specialist, in the release. Detection of the disease can take more than two weeks, she said, because the test needs to indicate the level of antibodies increasing in a blood sample.”
Anti-hate group speaks out against antisemitic incident in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills
LA Times, GREGORY YEE: “Days after a group of people dressed in clothing reminiscent of Nazi brownshirts drove a rented box truck displaying hateful messages down Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, a watchdog group is speaking out against the incident and says it has identified the hate group and two of its members.
According to StopAntisemitism, an organization that works to expose people and groups that engage in antisemitic behavior, the group responsible for Saturday’s incident is the Goyim Defense League.
The organization also named two people who were captured on video participating in the hateful rally: Jon Minadeo II and Robert Frank Wilson.”
Russian troops move to encircle strategic city in eastern Ukraine
LA Times, PATRICK J MCDONNELL/NABIH BULOS: “As the conflict in Ukraine enters its fourth month, Russian troops appear to be on the cusp of a breakthrough in the disputed Donbas region, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warning of difficult weeks ahead and accusing Moscow of waging “total war” against his country.
Russian forces have launched a concerted campaign to encircle Severodonetsk — the last major city in Luhansk province and easternmost point of the Donbas still under Ukrainian control — along with its sister city, Lysychansk, just to the south. If successful, the move would trap Ukrainian troops defending the area and open Russia’s path to Kramatorsk, the Ukrainian government’s main administrative and military node in the east.
By Tuesday morning, after days of withering artillery duels along the eastern front, Russian troops were reported to have seized portions of Lyman, a town roughly 30 miles west of Severodonetsk, and blitzed into the village of Zolote, about nine miles south of Lysychansk. Those attacks and a Russian stab from north of Severodonetsk form a three-pronged offensive to take the city.”