Politically savvy surfers in California fight plastic pollution
Capitol Weekly, AARON GILBREATH: “A landmark bill designed to drastically reduce plastic pollution in California, SB 54, was signed into law on June 30. It imposes the most stringent plastic reduction rules in the United States. It has to. California, like the world, is enduring a seemingly insurmountable plastic pollution crisis. The Surfrider Foundation continues to play a key part in reducing plastic pollution by shaping policy.
Even though many single-use plastic items are labeled as recyclable, only 9% of plastics ever get recycled. The other 91% ends up littering the ocean and terrestrial landscape. The stuff is everywhere, not just the obvious plastic bottles, plastic bags, and Styrofoam cups you see littering city streets, but the small particles that plastic breaks into, known as microplastics. By some estimates, over 14 million tons of plastic ends up into the ocean each year.
Currently, an enormous swirling mass of trash called the Eastern Garbage Patch floats between the coast of California and Hawaii. It is a dizzyingly vast mess of garbage and plastic items—everything from fishing nets to consumer plastic food ware—and its extent is too large and variable to accurately measure. Together with the Western Garbage Patch, off the east coast of Japan, it comprises the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, often referred to as a trash gyre or trash vortex for the way that ocean currents distribute and hold those plastics in place. It’s the largest of five plastic gyres on Earth, and it will only keep growing.”
‘Mysterious plastic items’ scooped up in 45-day sweep of Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The Chronicle, ANNIE VAINSHTEIN: “After 45 days plying the notorious Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a cargo ship hauling nearly 200,000 pounds of trash arrived Tuesday in Sausalito.
The 132-foot sailing cargo ship from the nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute gathered the more than 96 tons of ocean debris — ranging from fishing nets to kids’ plastic toys — during its cleanup voyage from Honolulu through the patch, more formally known as the North Pacific Gyre.
Across 4,600 nautical miles, the ship’s crew recovered the garbage haul in the vast Pacific area between Hawaii and San Francisco that’s prone to accumulations of swirling debris — what the ship’s captain, Locky MacLean, called mind-boggling miles of “whirlpooling, gyrating plastic debris floating around.””
Californians and other Americans are flooding Mexico City. Some locals want them to go home
LAT, KATE LINTHICUM: “Fernando Bustos Gorozpe was sitting with friends in a cafe here when he realized that — once again — they were outnumbered.
“We’re the only brown people,” said Bustos, a 38-year-old writer and university professor. “We’re the only people speaking Spanish except the waiters.”
Mexico has long been the top foreign travel destination for Americans, its bountiful beaches and picturesque pueblos luring tens of millions of U.S. visitors annually.
But in recent years, a growing number of tourists and remote workers — hailing from Brooklyn, N.Y., Silicon Valley and points in between — have flooded the nation’s capital and left a scent of new-wave imperialism.”
LAPD shuts down 6th Street Viaduct for fourth time in five days
LAT, GREGORY YEE: “Authorities have shut down the new 6th Street Viaduct connecting downtown Los Angeles to Boyle Heights for the fourth night in the last five days.
The Los Angeles Police Department announced the closure in a tweet shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday.
Specifics on the closure were not provided, other than “illegal activity and public safety concerns.””
Nearly every Bay Area city lost kids over the last decade — except this one. Here’s why
The Chronicle, SUSIE NEILSON: “Most Bay Area cities have seen their youth populations decline over the past decade, likely a consequence of the region’s increasingly staggering cost of living.
But some cities have seen steeper drops in kids than others, and the cities with the fewest children and teens to begin with mostly appear to have stabilized.
Of the 102 Bay Area towns and places with 5,000 people or more, just 10 saw their share of people under age 18 grow, according to a Chronicle review of census data. And of these 10 cities, nearly all saw very small gains of under 1 percentage point.”
Cal State agreed to keep sexual harassment findings against two professors under wraps
LAT, ALEXIS TIMKO: “After a few alcoholic drinks at a pizza joint near campus, a professor in the psychology department at Cal State San Marcos allegedly insinuated to a female student that he was turned on and started kissing her neck.
In the chemistry department, a professor pinned a female student’s arms to her side, lowered his hands to her back and pressed his groin against her hips, she said.
Both professors denied the claims but investigations conducted by the campus Title IX office concluded the professors had engaged in egregious sexual harassment and misconduct in violation of university policy. The professors’ accounts of the events were found to be not credible.”
One of California’s tallest redwoods is 2,000 years old. Inside the fight to keep it safe
The Chronicle, GREGORY THOMAS: “Standing on the side of Highway 116, which winds through the dense forests of western Sonoma County, John Dunlap looked across the Russian River into a stand of tall trees and pointed out one old redwood in particular.
“It’s really a hidden gem here that’s kind of out of sight, out of mind,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t deserving of our attention.”
Up from the riverbank near Guerneville is the county’s tallest tree, an estimated 2,000-year-old, 340-footer known as the Clar Tree. Once thought to be the highest tree in California, it carries the name of a timber family that lived in the area back when it was a logging capital. It is easily identifiable by its dead, forked crown — the result of a lightning strike some years ago.”
Audit report: State board drags feet on providing clean drinking water to nearly 1 million Californians
The Chronicle, CHASE DIFELICIANTONIO: “A California state auditor’s report slammed the State Water Resources Control Board on Tuesday for what it called a lethargic approach to funding projects that should be getting safe drinking water to nearly 1 million state residents who do not have it, many of them in disadvantaged communities.
“The State Water Board has funding available to help these failing systems improve the quality of their drinking water,” the auditors wrote. “Nonetheless, the board has generally demonstrated a lack of urgency in providing this critical assistance.”
The issue, the report said, is the increasingly long times the board is taking to get that money out the door to pay experts to upgrade and install clean drinking water systems.”
These before and after images show the devastating effects of California’s drought — from space
The Chronicle, YOOHYUN JUNG: “Sometimes, it takes zooming out to a bird’s eye view to fully understand the devastating impacts of drought in California.
Images captured from space by government and private satellites offer a sobering look at how the current drought — in year three — is affecting the state’s land and natural resources.
The latest data from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows about 97% of California in moderate or worse drought, with much of the Central Valley and southern portions of the state in the worst conditions.”
Feds to investigate USC student’s complaint of antisemitism
AP: “The U.S. Department of Education will investigate USC after a Jewish student said she resigned from student government because she endured harassment over her pro-Israel views.
The inquiry by the department’s Office for Civil Rights stems from a complaint by the Jewish advocacy nonprofit Louis D. Brandeis Center alleging the university “allowed a hostile environment of anti-Semitism to proliferate on its campus,” the center said in a statement Tuesday.
The complaint was filed on behalf of Rose Ritch, who stepped down as student body vice president in August 2020. Ritch said she resigned following a campaign to remove her over her alleged lack of commitment to racial justice amid the national outcry over George Floyd’s killing and the Black Lives Matter movement.”
Can infants learn math? State-backed pilot project in Fresno aims to find out
EdSource, ASHLEIGH POANOO: “nside the infant room at the Lighthouse for Children Center in Fresno, 1-year-old Peyton is learning math. As he climbs on top of a short table — a place he shouldn’t be — his teacher tells him, “You’re up on the table.” Then asks, “Can you show me down?” And “Pey-Pey,” as he’s nicknamed, obliges, climbing down to safety.
As teacher Brittany Montelongo is changing the baby’s diaper, she talks him through each step: first they wipe, then a clean diaper goes on. Lastly, Peyton happily helps throw the diaper in the trash.
Peyton feels accomplished, Montelongo says, and he’s not even aware he’s just learned about spatial relationships and sequencing."
S.F. Bay Area weather: Monsoonal moisture brings drizzle and the threat of lightning strikes
The Chronicle, JESSICA FLORES: “Monsoonal moisture moving through the region brought light showers to the North and East Bay Tuesday morning, weather forecasters said.
Rain was expected to fall primarily over the Sacramento Valley, but some Bay Area cities — like Byron and Napa — were expected to see scattered showers through the late morning hours, said Brayden Murdock, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
“A lot of this is pretty high-base stuff. So what that means is not a lot of (the rain) actually got to the ground,” Murdock said.”
COVID outbreaks hit TSA, American and Southwest airlines at LAX
LAT, SALVADOR HERNANDEZ: “COVID-19 outbreaks have hit Los Angeles International Airport with at least 400 confirmed cases among Transportation Security Administration staff and workers at American and Southwest airlines, according to county health officials.
At least 233 TSA staffers at LAX have tested positive for the coronavirus since an outbreak was first detected among workers June 9, according to the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
The TSA outbreak would be the largest active outbreak being monitored by the department, which records outbreaks at residential care facilities, workplaces, food and retail stores, homeless service locations, schools, jails, law enforcement settings and courts.”
L.A. County could avoid mask mandate this week as coronavirus cases decline
LAT, LUKE MONEY/RONG-GONG LIN II: “Recent declines in cases and coronavirus-positive hospitalizations could pull Los Angeles County back from the brink of a new universal public indoor mask mandate.
Although a decision on whether to impose the long-looming order won’t come until later this week, health officials noted Tuesday that improvements in some COVID-19 metrics might merit a delay.
Such a pause would mark a major turnaround for the nation’s most populous county. A mask mandate appeared likely as of the end of last week, much to the chagrin of some residents, business groups and elected leaders who characterized it as an unnecessary and ineffectual overreach.”
This Bay Area mayor offered a bounty to track down mysterious source of ‘incessant’ music
The Chronicle, ANNIE VAINSHTEIN: “The inscrutably loud noise that disturbed slumbering residents in Richmond and its neighboring cities seems to have been identified, according to Richmond Mayor Tom Butt, who offered a $500 reward to anyone who could “clearly identify” the source of the noise.
The noise — described by some disgruntled residents as an “incessant bass tone beat” and “a loop of electronic dance music” — reportedly began late Saturday night and drowned the city in sound until at least 9 a.m. Sunday, Butt said.
In his blog post titled “Mystery Bass Beat Plagues Richmond,” Butt wrote that hundreds of people took to Nextdoor and Facebook and made calls to police in an effort to identify the source of the mysterious noise.”
What to expect from the next set of Jan. 6 committee hearings
LAT, SARAH D. WIRE: “The House Jan. 6 committee has so far presented a detailed narrative, including several bombshells, of efforts by former President Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election. But an influx of new witnesses and evidence shows there is a lot left for the panel to say when televised hearings resume in September.
The monthlong break will give the committee time to process the new information and draw connections between evidence uncovered in the more than 1,000 depositions and tens of thousands of documents it has collected in a nearly yearlong investigation. Ongoing legal actions indicate the committee isn’t giving up on getting more testimony and records from former White House employees, those who advised Trump and some of the people involved in the riot, as the panel rushes to complete its work before the end of the year.
“The one thing we can be certain [of] is that the committee knows more than we do.... You have that sense that we are seeing only a small portion of sort of the proverbial tip of the iceberg,” said Lara Brown, director of the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management.”
Taliban crackdown on rights is ‘suffocating’ women, Amnesty International finds
AP, RAHIM FAIEZ: “The lives of Afghan women and girls are being destroyed by a “suffocating” crackdown by the Taliban since they took power nearly a year ago, Amnesty International said in a report released Wednesday.
After they captured the capital, Kabul, in August 2021 and ousted the internationally backed government, the Taliban presented themselves as having moderated since their first time in power, in the 1990s. Initially, Taliban officials spoke of allowing women to continue to work and girls to continue their education.
Instead, they formed an all-male government stacked with veterans of their hard-line rule that has banned girls from attending school from seventh grade, imposed all-covering dress that leaves only the eyes visible and restricted women’s access to work.”
