Good morning. It’s Wednesday, Oct. 7.
- California’s winter forecast gets even wetter.
- OpenAI unveils hundreds more math breakthroughs.
- And smear campaigns target women in Hollywood.
Statewide
1.
The furor over President Trump’s recent remarks on Iran — “let them take out” Los Angeles and San Diego, he said — intensified on Tuesday. A sampling of reporting and analysis:
- Given Trump’s habit of extreme rhetoric and open antipathy toward California’s blue cities, it’s not hard to imagine that he meant to invite the destruction of L.A. and San Diego, wrote CNN’s Aaron Blake. But Trump’s comment, Blake argued, was a product of “incoherence,” not maliciousness.
- Whatever Trump’s meaning, the crowd in Grand Island, Nebraska, delighted when he invoked the annihilation of two West Coast cities. The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker spoke to rallygoers. “Throughout history, if you look at the Bible, God has used people like President Trump to fulfill his will,” Rose Sober, 64, told her.
- Jim Desmond, a San Diego County supervisor who is running in a highly competitive House race, was among the few Republicans to condemn Trump’s remarks. “No American family should ever be treated as collateral damage,” he wrote. S.D. Union-Tribune
2.
For years, Xavier Becerra has described himself as a son of immigrants who came to America with $12 in their pockets and “lived the California Dream.” As the Democrat now seeks to glide into the governor’s office, political rivals are highlighting the fact that his father was born in Sacramento, if raised in Tijuana, making him a U.S. citizen. Daniel Reyes, a conservative podcast host, accused Becerra of “immigrant stolen valor.” Becerra dismissed the criticism as ignorant of the immigrant experience. L.A. Times
3.
Should any doubts linger about California’s rainy winter outlook, the climatologist Daniel Swain had this to say about the latest modeling on Tuesday: “I’ve never seen such high predictive confidence in a very wet California winter. This is a truly extraordinary forecast amid a record-strength El Niño event.” He continued: “To be quite honest, this is a seriously concerning outlook. While it remains true that El Niño, even a very strong one, ’tilts the odds’ rather than guaranteeing outcomes, the current forecast suggests one heck of an odds tilt toward wet conditions.” @weatherwest.bsky.social | S.F. Chronicle
- Clear drains. Plant shrubs. Check your insurance. The Los Angeles Times offered nine ways to prepare for El Niño.
Northern California
4.
In September, OpenAI angered the math world when it announced that its artificial intelligence had solved a collection of important unanswered math questions. On Tuesday, the company released the solutions to hundreds more problems across number theory, algebraic geometry, and other fields. The results made mathematicians’ heads spin. “If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked,” said Alex Kontorovich, a Rutgers math professor. N.Y. Times | Wall Street Journal
5.
Bill Harris, a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army who helped kidnap the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment in 1974, died on Sept. 10 in San Francisco, the New York Times reported. After serving in Vietnam, Harris’ politics drifted left. He joined the militant Bay Area outfit and embarked on a crime rampage that epitomized the revolutionary far left of the 1970s. In time, historians of the American left came to view the S.L.A. unfavorably. The political activist Todd Gitlin called the group a cult “lip-syncing revolutionary rhetoric.” Harris was 81.
6.
“Oh my god!”
Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford University neuroscientist, got the call after midnight informing him that he had won a Nobel Prize for medicine. “I almost felt as if I’d lost the power of forming words,” he recalled. He stayed up all night taking calls of congratulations. Then his kids woke up. Their blissed-out reactions upon hearing the news, captured on video, went viral. A.P.
7.
In Ferndale, the Mayberry-like village along Humboldt County’s Eel river, a debate over Halloween skeletons has split the town. Ferndale approaches holidays with gusto, festooning its historic Main Street with decorations. But critics say the number of skeletons in bookstores, restaurants, and gift shops is scaring children. They’ve called for a boycott. Leah Daniels, a coffeeshop owner, took offense. “They’re not all gory,” she said of the skeletons. “They’re just, you know, skeletons doing goofy things.” Lost Coast Outpost
Southern California
8.
The couple found with 21 children born through surrogacy in their Arcadia mansion last year were arrested Tuesday on child abuse charges. Prosecutors said children suffered daily beatings from nannies as the couple — Guojun Xuan, 66, and Silvia Zhang, 39 — watched via surveillance cameras. “This case is unprecedented,” said Nathan Hochman, the L.A. County district attorney. “It is horrific. The physical abuse, beating and punishment that these very young children received is despicable.” A.P. | L.A. Times
- “Why had they collected so many children?” The New Yorker’s In the Dark podcast has been following the troubling case.
9.
Nithya Raman, the front-runner in the race for Los Angeles mayor, faced a backlash on Tuesday after she appeared in an influencer’s video calling for the removal of the city’s police chief and urging viewers to “stop fascist liars.” Asked how she would “de-fascistize” the city if elected, Raman said she would seek new leadership at the LAPD. The city’s rank-and-file police union accused Raman of endangering lives: “There is a reason that the chief and the mayor have a security detail, it’s because they are under constant threat.” L.A. Times | CBS News
10.
A New York Times investigation found that Bryan Freedman, a prominent lawyer known for representing actor Justin Baldoni against actress Blake Lively, was linked to alleged smear campaigns against several other women. In lawsuits, the women say websites popped up out of nowhere designed to destroy their reputations with accusations of prostitution, sex trafficking, and drug dealing. “The women who have sued describe the shaming campaigns as an internet wrecking ball, forever changing how the public views them,” the Times wrote.
11.
Santa Ana officials said they were investigating after a video circulated widely online showing a pair of officers beating a man they had already restrained. Florentino Junior Lopez, 28, was bent over the hood of police cruiser, his hands behind his back, when one of the officers suddenly yanked him to the ground and started raining punches down on him on Oct. 1. “They just totally abused Mr. Lopez for like three minutes without justification,” Lopez’s attorney, John Kremer, said. Voice of Orange County | CBS News
12.
More than 300 Los Angeles police officers earned above $300,000 last year, an analysis found. In the New York Police Department, which is four times the size of the LAPD, just 15 people cleared that mark. Staffing shortages explain the eye-popping paychecks, police officials say. In July, the LAPD’s uniformed force numbered about 8,550 members, a 30-year low. Extreme overtime loads fill the gap, officials say. Paradoxically, the smallest L.A. police force in a quarter century is also the most expensive. The Basin
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