Good morning. It’s Friday, May 9.
- California congressman launches “abundance” caucus.
- UCLA medical school accused of race-based admissions.
- And a mud puddle crawls menacingly across the desert.
Please note: The newsletter will be off on Monday. Back in your inbox on Tuesday.
Statewide
1.
Rep. Josh Harder, a San Joaquin Valley Democrat, has launched a new bipartisan coalition inspired by the “abundance movement,” which posits that a fixation on protections over progress has robbed Americans of affordable housing, mass transit, and other desirables. They’re calling it the Build America caucus. “What you’re witnessing here,” Harder said on Thursday, “is a unicorn event … a bipartisan caucus coming together to actually solve problems.” S.F. Chronicle | Politico
2.
A new survey by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found that just a quarter of Californians are feeling more hopeful about their financial well-being than they did a year ago. When the results are broken out by party affiliation, however, a remarkable split appears. The share of Democrats who feel upbeat is 9%; among Republicans, it’s 57%. “I’ve never seen this before,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the poll. “I’ve been polling for over 40 years in California and the last five years or so, everything seems to turn on party.” L.A. Times
- Columnist Dan Walters: California may now have the world’s fourth-ranked economy, but it also has the nation’s highest poverty rate and its third-highest unemployment rate. CalMatters
3.
The California Highway Patrol unveiled a fleet of new patrol vehicles on Thursday that are designed to blend subtly into traffic, giving officers a stealth advantage as they try to catch drivers in the act of speeding or weaving through lanes. The initiative arose in response to what officials said was a growing threat of reckless driving, or what they called “video game-styled” driving. “A small percentage of aggressive drivers puts everyone at risk,” the agency said. S.F. Chronicle | L.A. Times
4.
“Savvy travelers call Cayucos ‘the last great California beach town.’ That’s a rather grand statement — but when I saw the sun go down from a small wooden viewing deck above the beach, they could have called the town anything they liked.”
James March, a British travel writer, wrote about the delights he encountered on a recent swing through the San Luis Obispo area. Lonely Planet
Northern California
5.
San Jose’s mayor, Matt Mahan, unveiled plans on Thursday to establish a police unit dedicated to arresting homeless people who decline offers of shelter. “The goal has always been to get people the help they need,” Mahan said. “What is not okay and what we are not going to continue to accept as a city is the idea that you can say, ‘No thanks,’ forever more, and indefinitely choose” to camp on the streets. Critics have accused city officials of criminalizing homelessness instead of working to solve the affordability crisis. San Jose Spotlight | Mercury News
6.
Cliona Ward, a 54-year-old Santa Cruz resident and green-card holder who has lived in the U.S. since she was a child, was released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Wednesday after being held in custody for 17 days. Her arrest, upon returning from a visit with her sick father in Ireland, was linked to a pair of old drug convictions, reports said. Her sister, Orla Holladay, said Ward was deeply shaken by the ordeal. “The first thing she did was jump on the bed and hug the pillows.” The Guardian | SFGATE
7.
In California, AmeriCorps employs nearly 7,000 mostly young people who do service work on minimal stipends. Among them is Natalia Valdés Heredia, who has been working on a nature preserve in Monterey County. She grows blue oak seedlings, whacks weeds, fixes leaky faucets, and removes downed trees with a chainsaw. She loves it, she said. But after the Trump administration’s gutting of AmeriCorps, she may say goodbye to more than just the Corps. She’s looking into opportunities in Canada or Australia. “If I really need to go that route,” she said, “I’m not afraid to.” Bay Nature
8.
On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman talked with Joe Kloc, whose new book “Lost at Sea” profiles the vanishing community of people living on boats illegally anchored off of Sausalito. He talked about the rituals that bound the so-called anchor-outs to each other. They formed a congregation called Pirate Church and mourned their dead by lighting model boats on fire and pushing them out to sea. “It was pretty robust, I have to say,” he said of the community. “That was one of the coolest things about getting to know everybody over the years.”
Southern California
9.
A federal class-action lawsuit filed on Thursday accuses UCLA’s medical school of illegally using race as a factor in admissions. Unnamed “whistleblowers” in the complaint alleged that the school’s admissions panel “routinely gives Black and Latino applicants a pass for subpar metrics” and that “whites and Asians need near-perfect scores.” Among the plaintiffs is Students for Fair Admissions, the nonprofit that won a landmark lawsuit against Harvard’s affirmative action program in 2023. The group’s president, Edward Blum, portrayed the new lawsuit as a sequel to the Harvard case. L.A. Times
10.
Over the last couple decades, a mud puddle has mysteriously crawled hundreds of feet across a patch of earth near the Salton Sea. Scientists can’t figure out why, and it’s wreaking havoc on road and rail infrastructure. Even the authorities trying to stop it can’t help but marvel at the geologic oddity. Shawn Rizzutto, a Caltrans official, recalled the first time he saw it. “How cool is this,” he thought. “We have the only moving mud pot in the world, and I get to work on it.” Alta
- Photographer Kevin Key took recent video of the mudpot.
11.
Jimmy Wayne Carwyle, a 48-year-old Mississippi man accused of crashing his car through the gates of Jennifer Aniston’s Bel Air home on Monday, had proclaimed that God wanted him to marry the actress, a longtime friend said. Over the past two years, Carwyle sent Aniston unwanted messages on social media, voice mail, and email, officials said. On Wednesday, prosecutors charged him with with stalking and vandalism. He could face three years in prison. N.Y. Times
In case you missed it
12.
Five items that got big views over the past week:
- About 20 years ago, a couple discovered a dream property while kayaking the Kings River east of Fresno. They bought it and asked Arthur Dyson, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright, to create a home that mirrored the shape of the hills. They just listed it, pictured above, for $2.3 million. Wall Street Journal | Fresno Bee
- Also up for grabs: one of the country’s finest post-and-beam homes in Pasadena and an 1881 Victorian in Sacramento.
- When two businessmen built San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado in 1888, they intended for it to “be the talk of the Western world.” Now, after six years and $550 million, crews are close to completing the most ambitious renovation in the hotel’s history. N.Y. Times
- The Yurok Tribe shared pictures showing the influence of spring along a stretch of the newly freed Klamath River. They depict verdant green riverbanks, bursts of red-orange wildflowers, and lounging deer — a sharp contrast from the grayish muck initially exposed after the removal of dams last year. Yurok Tribe
- In the early 2000s, the Modesto Bee had more than a hundred reporters; it now has around a dozen. In the surrounding area, residents have turned instead to Facebook groups, podcasters, and online influencers. That’s how it came to be that a militia stormed into town ready to battle an imaginary invasion of Black Lives Matter protesters, the N.Y. Times reported.
- California’s transportation planners used to be skeptical of roundabouts, the circular alternative to stop lights. But they’ve learned to love them. Last week, Berkeley declared work done on side-by-side roundabouts. A Redditor posted a very cool drone view.
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The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
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