Good morning. It’s Friday, Oct. 16.
- Trump administration sues over alleged noncitizen voting.
- Mendocino County man tries to breed the perfect dog.
- And UFO-like home in San Jacinto Mountains seeks buyer.
Statewide
1.
The Trump administration on Thursday sued California, asking a judge to block the votes of roughly 20,000 people that the federal government identified as “likely” noncitizens. State officials called the move “meritless,” “unprecedented,” and “desperate.” David Becker, an election-law expert, said the lawsuit is “fairly frivolous.” “If they were seeking to work in good faith to clean up the voter list … they would have done this months ago,” Becker said. It suggests, he added, that the true purpose is to set the stage for claims of voter fraud. A.P. | N.Y. Times
2.
“I am so sorry, Pop.”
“For what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just for all of it.”
When the stakes are low, mental lapses are forgivable. But what happens when your father nearly costs you your life by neglecting to tie a crucial knot on a rock wall in Yosemite? Daniel Duane’s father died in January. In a moving essay, the writer wrestled with the guilt he felt for pulling away from his father over an “almost-unfathomable breach of basic diligence” so many years earlier. N.Y. Times Magazine
3.
Republican Rep. David Valadao’s San Joaquin Valley district is one of California’s poorest. It’s almost among the most competitive districts in the country. President Trump’s popularity has fallen among Latinos, who make up a majority of the district. Many now say that rising costs have made it harder to survive. Vanessa Martinez, 26, went from working two jobs to three. “I’m making the most I’ve ever made,” she said, “and I’m probably the brokest I’ve ever been.” The Guardian wrote about the fight for California’s “toughest political battleground.”
4.
The California newt is one of the most engaging animals endemic to the state. They mostly reveal themselves during the rainy season, when they emerge from forest burrows and waddle to a pond to mate. Females then attach fertilized eggs in jelly-like sacs to submerged vegetation. It was during this moment in the newt reproductive cycle that the photographer Anton Sorokin snapped the incredible picture above, which was just honored by the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of Year contest. See other winners.
- View more of Sorokin’s newt photography.
5.
On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman talks with author Miriam Pawel about her new book, “California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of California.” Pawel discussed the extraordinary ambition that led to the state’s expansion of the public higher education in the 1950s and 60s. Its success relied on a handful of lofty principles: education should be free, new campuses should be first-class from the day they open, and each campus should have a unique identity suited to its surrounding community.
Northern California
6.
On May 22, 2024, the Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen attended a lunch with Biden administration officials who, in his retelling, divulged a secret plan to take control of the AI industry and outlaw all startups. Andreessen and his colleagues walked out of the meeting and told each other “Yep, we’re for Trump,” he recalled. The story has become Silicon Valley lore. According to officials who attended the meeting, it’s total fiction. Bloomberg Businessweek tried to answer the question: “Why is tech billionaire Marc Andreessen so mad?”
7.
A winemaker in Northern California’s Anderson Valley has been working to breed the perfect dog. Fox collies, as he calls them, are descendants of a dog once bred to herd sheep in the Scottish Highlands.
“The fox collie can work a ranch and run all day but can also play fetch, hang out in the passenger seat of a car for long drives and relax next to you in bed. Unlike Border collies, say, whose breeding seems to prohibit them from sitting still, fox collies are pros at the art of chill,” the New York Times reported.
8.
A developer named Pierre-Louis Biojout created a video game set in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District that involves shooting “zombies” that appear to be modeled on homeless residents. Other targets include a Black security guard and figures hunched over in a pose commonly referred to as the “fentanyl fold.” Biojout promoted the game on X with the line: “San Francisco couldn’t fix the Tenderloin. So I monetized it.” Critics called the game dehumanizing and “an incitement of violence.” S.F. Chronicle
Southern California
9.
Wildfires on Thursday at Camp Pendleton and in the Santa Monica Mountains north of Malibu had residents fearing the worst as strong Santa Ana winds threatened to whip up the flames. But by nighttime, reports said, firefighters appeared to get an upper hand on both the Bryson Fire in L.A. County, which reached roughly 200 acres, and the Henderson Fire in San Diego County, which surpassed 1,400 acres. Red Flag warnings would remain in effect through Saturday, the National Weather Service said. A.P. | L.A. Times | S.D. Union-Tribune
10.
Artificial intelligence robots have begun patrolling grocery store aisles in Southern California, and shoppers are unnerved. Known as Tally, the 6-foot robot scans shelves for stock levels and prices. On a recent Wednesday, as a Tally rolled through the aisles of a Los Angeles Ralphs making low beeping noises, a young boy yelled, “Robot! Robot!” Ricardo Valadez, 62, said he felt like the device was stalking him. “I was kind of like, ‘What the hell is that?'” he said. L.A. Times
11.
In the late 1960s, the Finnish architect Matti Suuronen designed what he called the “Futuro house,” a prefabricated plastic home with bubblelike windows reminiscent of a flying saucer. Of the fewer than 100 that were made, only about half remain, and they are highly sought after by architectural collectors. One of them, perched on a rock outcropping in the San Jacinto Mountains, recently came onto the market for $1.495 million. The Wall Street Journal told the story of “a spaceship in the mountains.”
In case you missed it
12.
Five items that got big views over the past week.
- Panoche is a one-bar town surrounded by bleached hills along the eastern flanks of the Diablo Range. Only the tough survive there, including juniper, San Joaquin kit foxes, and a few hundred humans. The photographer Sara Ferguson published a gorgeous series of pictures of the Panoche area.
- It’s a classic road-trip game: trying to identify which crops are growing from the farmland along California’s highways. Sabhya Chhabria, a Bay Area software engineer, has created a user-friendly map that identifies all 384,000 agricultural fields across the state. Explore the map.
- Tropical Storm Rachel sent powerful waves crashing into Long Beach last weekend, splintering the boardwalk and flooding homes. See video from the storm:
- Swells crash into Long Beach homes.
- Streets are submerged in Newport Beach.
- A wave slams against an Amtrak train.
- On Saturday night, a pair of blinding spotlights appeared to shine down from the mountains near Mt. Whitney, alarming locals. It turned out that were part of an experiment by a California startup with an audacious plan to illuminate the earth at night using giant mirrors in space. S.F. Chronicle
- In an essay published in 2017, the former Vanity Fair design director Charles Churchward coined the term “School of Los Angeles” to describe the “highly romanticized vision of humanity” represented in the work of celebrity photographers in the 1980s. L.A.’s Fahey/Klein Gallery just opened an exhibit on the photography movement.
- Many of the images are available to view online.
Get your California Sun T-shirts, phone cases, hoodies, hats, and totes!
The California Sun, PO Box 6868, Los Osos, CA 93412
Wake up to must-read news from around the Golden State delivered to your inbox each morning.