Election 2024: California voters likely to decide whether to spend billions to defend state against fires, floods and heat waves
BANG*Mercury News, PAUL ROGERS: "Massive forest fires. Deadly floods. Record heat waves. Historic droughts.
Over the past decade, California has repeatedly experienced the destructive impacts of climate change — “weather on steroids” — costing billions of dollars in damage and claiming dozens of lives."
Gavin Newsom, California lawmakers face looming budget deadline. Here’s what they’re debating
AP, LINDSEY HOLDEN, MAGGIE ANGST: "California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders have negotiated major elements of the state budget — although they remain at odds over Newsom’s eleventh-hour push to streamline large-scale infrastructure projects.
Over the weekend, lawmakers released bills showing the major outlines of a $310.8 billion spending plan that eliminates proposed cuts to public transit, funds a plan to transform San Quentin State Prison and increases pay for child care providers."
California Congress members call for expansion of San Gabriel Mountains National Monument
LA Times, LKOUIS SAHAGUN: "In a bid to expand wilderness protections to the mountains and foothills just north of the Los Angeles Basin, California Rep. Judy Chu and Sen. Alex Padilla have asked President Biden to add 109,167 acres to the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument — an act they say would help preserve an area that is rich in historical and ecological significance and is within just an hour’s drive of 18 million people.
The move would increase the monument by roughly a third, and extend its boundaries to the back door of San Fernando Valley neighborhoods including Sylmar, Santa Clarita and Pacoima. It would also give the U.S. Forest Service greater ability to protect natural resources and manage crowds in areas left out of the 2014 monument designation by then-President Obama."
The Supreme Court’s biggest decisions are coming. Here’s what they could say
AP, JESSICA GRESKO, MARK SHERMAN: "The Supreme Court is getting ready to decide some of its biggest cases of the term. The high court has 10 opinions left to release over the next week before the justices begin their summer break. As is typical, the last opinions to be released cover some of the most contentious issues the court has wrestled with this term including affirmative action, student loans and gay rights.
Here's a look at some of the cases the court has left to decide from the term that began back in October:"
These bleating firefighters have an insatiable appetite for wildfire fuel — weeds
LA Times, JEANETTE MARANTOS: "When it comes to wildfire control, you’ve gotta love goats.
Machines may be cheaper at clearing open spaces by tilling flammable weeds — and all their seeds — into the ground, but they’re also noisy and polluting, damaging soil structure and the beneficial bugs and organisms that dwell underground."
Pacific Crest Trail ‘angels’ are swooping in to save hikers from the deep Sierra snow
The Chronicle, GREGORY THOMAS: "After hiking 700 miles from the Mexico border northward along the Pacific Crest Trail this spring, Olivia Shan hit the southern end of the Sierra and stopped to reassess. The mountain range unfurling hundreds of miles into the distance was “white as hell” with ice and snow, she said.
Shan decided to skip the Sierra and began looking for transportation to Oregon. Scrolling through a Facebook trail group, she read a post from a Sacramento pilot named Chris Hoffman offering free rides in his small airplane to thru-hikers hoping to bypass the snowbound mountains."
Proposition 28 a windfall for arts education, but implementation poses challenges
EdSource, KAREN D'SOUZA: "Arts education has long been hailed for its transformative power, a way to boost everything from test scores to social-emotional learning. Unfortunately, budget woes have cut arts education so close to the bone that only 11% of California schools offer a comprehensive arts education, research suggests. That’s a stark inequity that arts education advocates have long labored to rectify.
“Creativity is a muscle, not a gene, and if it’s a muscle then you can make it stronger,” said Jessica Mele, a program officer specializing in arts education at the Hewlett Foundation. “The problem is that arts education in this country has historically been ruled by assumptions about who can and should be allowed to participate in the arts and a lot of that has to do with race and class and geography.”"
‘We need some fun’: Party after S.F. Pride Parade gives Civic Center a needed boost
The Chronicle, ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH: "Hours after San Francisco’s LGBTQ Pride Parade wound down Sunday, thousands of people continued the party at Civic Center, giving the neighborhood an energy missing in recent years.
Among them was Nick Ramos, 20, who was there for his first Pride."
Sacramento County residents ‘don’t want to back down to hate’ after vandals burn Pride flags
Sac Bee, ROSALIO AHUMADA: "Johanna Martinezmoles had an ominous feeling someone would try to vandalize her rainbow-colored Pride flag when she first placed it last year outside her Antelope home.
She said she knows raising a flag to show she and her family are allies to the LGBTQ+ community would unintentionally become a lightning rod to criticism from the intolerant, even in their Sacramento County suburban neighborhood."
‘They’re making up stuff’: How the narrative of S.F. as dystopian hellscape is affecting the city
The Chronicle, CAROLYN SAID: "San Francisco is a dystopian hellscape overrun by armed criminals and fentanyl addicts, its streets teeming with human waste, its buildings crumbling before our eyes.
That’s the situation according to recent stories in major media outlets from CNN to Good Morning America, from the Financial Times to Newsweek, along with legions of posters on TikTok, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, and perennial S.F. haters like Fox News, the New York Post and, of course, Elon Musk. Presidential candidates Ron DeSantis and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also chimed in last week."
Is California rolling back public access to police misconduct records?
Mercury News, JOHN WOOLFOLK: "In September 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic lawmakers touted a package of bills creating a system to decertify law enforcement officers for serious misconduct and increasing transparency of their personnel records — a move aimed at weeding cops with a history of troubling behavior out of law enforcement.
It was hardly revolutionary: California had been one of only five states in the country without a system to revoke the badges of rogue cops."
More California prisoners are requesting gender-affirming health care, including surgeries
CALMatters, ANABEL SOSA: "The number of California prisoners requesting gender-affirming health care more than doubled last year, and the state’s corrections agency expects the trend to continue even as the overall state inmate population is projected to decline.
The estimate comes from budget documents detailing the agency’s responsibilities for two groundbreaking policies the state adopted over the last seven years."x
Fights, beatings and a birth: Videos smuggled out of L.A. jails reveal violence, neglect
LA Times, KERI BLAKINGER: "The attack begins after less than a minute. Two dozen men are milling about a rec room in Men’s Central Jail when one of them takes a swing.
Others pile on, and soon half a dozen people are punching, kicking and stabbing. There are no jailers in sight — and no sign they even notice. Suddenly, after roughly a minute, the violence stops. The attackers seem to have grown bored, or maybe tired."
In Ukraine, a harvest of death as bodies of the fallen are returned to their hometowns
LA Times, LAURA KING: "One day, there might be two. Then, perhaps — an increasing rarity — a day with none. And then, as on this hot, cloud-shrouded day, four.
Four caskets to be carried by pallbearers along a cobblestone street lined with silent mourners. Four names intoned in the echoing, dimly lighted recesses of a landmark church. Four fresh graves hewn from claylike soil in a historic cemetery where the newly dead are crowding out the old."
Crisis in Russia reverberates in the Ukraine war, with effects still to unfold
LA Times, LAURA KING, TRACY WILKINSON: "How will the short but shocking mutiny by a Russian paramilitary group affect the war in Ukraine?
In muddy field bunkers and chilly war rooms lit by blinking electronic screens, that question is being assessed by Ukrainian officials and field commanders — and the answer may depend largely on the time frame involved."
