Good morning. It’s Tuesday, Feb. 24.
- Gavin Newsom faces pile-on over SAT remarks.
- Wall Street reveals deep anxiety over AI future.
- And Yosemite’s firefall makes a modest return.
Statewide
1.
During a public talk in Atlanta on Sunday, Mayor Andre Dickens asked Gov. Gavin Newsom what he wanted readers of his memoir to know about his life growing up. Newsom reflected on his academic shortcomings: “I’m not trying to impress you,” he said. “I’m just trying to impress upon you, I’m like you. I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy.” Reacting to a video clip of that remark online Monday, conservative commentators pounced, accusing Newsom of calling “black people dumb.” Defenders of the governor noted that he made no mention of race. The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf called the outrage “a race-baiting pile-on in response to a misleadingly clipped video.” CBS News | L.A. Times
- In his memoir, Newsom is revealed as a person shaped more by struggle than privilege, wrote the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney: “In many ways, Newsom is still the kid with dyslexia who fabricated a bibliography so he could get a passing grade on a paper.”
2.
Sen. Adam Schiff, along with dozens of other Democrats, is planning to boycott President Trump’s State of the Union address today. Instead, he’ll speak at a rally on the National Mall, dubbed “The People’s State of the Union.” Schiff said he’s never missed a State of the Union. “But we cannot treat this as normal,” he added. “This is not business as usual. I will not give him the audience he craves for the lies that he tells.” California’s other U.S. senator, Alex Padilla, will deliver the Democratic Party’s Spanish-language rebuttal to Trump’s speech. LAist | N.Y. Times
3.
Stormy weather and road closures threatened to scuttle February’s firefall in Yosemite, the two-week phenomenon when the angle of the setting sun transforms El Capitan’s Horsetail Fall into what looks like a ribbon of glowing lava. But the national park reopened over the weekend, drawing eager photographers who trudged through the snow to viewing areas. Below, a few of them shared their finest shots from Saturday and Sunday with the California Sun.
- See a great time-lapse video of the firefall from Sunday.
Northern California
4.
Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez did not expect to be deported. She was a DACA recipient, brought into California as a child 27 years ago. Now 42, she was Motel 6 manager with a spotless criminal record who had faithfully obtained federal permission to remain in the country. But when she walked into her green card appointment in Sacramento last week, she was arrested. By the next morning, she was in Mexico, separated from her 21-year-old American daughter. “Basically, my life was ended,” she said. “I have to reinvent myself in a country that, even though it’s mine, I don’t know.” Sacramento Bee
5.
“El Mencho,” the drug cartel leader whose Sunday killing set off turmoil in Mexico, was first caught dealing drugs in San Francisco at age 19. After illegally crossing the border, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes found himself in San Francisco jails twice in the late 1980s and later served three years in a California prison for heroin trafficking. Deported back to Mexico, Oseguera Cervantes formed the Jalisco New Generation cartel in 2009. It grew into one of the country’s most ruthless organizations. S.F. Chronicle | L.A. Times
6.
If there was any question about how jumpy investors are about artificial intelligence, an 800-point drop in the Dow on Monday illustrated how deep the anxiety goes. A “thought exercise” published by the analysis firm Citrini imagined a scenario in which the AI explosion wipes out white-collar employment. “For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input,” Citrini wrote. “We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium.” As the post spread online, software stocks plunged. IBM fell 13%, the worst one-day performance since 2000. Wall Street Journal
7.
The leaders of the artificial intelligence revolution have made a habit of comparing chatbots to humans. Last Friday, OpenAI’s Sam Altman addressed worries about the power demands of data centers: “It also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” he said. “It takes, like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.” Anthropic is studying whether its chatbot can feel “distress.” This is alarming, wrote the Atlantic’s Matteo Wong: “A genuine belief that they are building a higher power, perhaps even a god … might easily justify treating humans and the planet as collateral damage.”
8.
The former head of a major homeless charity in San Francisco is facing charges of misusing at least $1.2 million in public funds, prosecutors said on Monday. Gwendolyn Westbrook, who led the United Council of Human Services for nearly two decades, paid herself a hidden salary from publicly funded bank accounts between 2019 and 2023, officials said. A 2023 lawsuit accused Westbrook of using the money support a “lavish” lifestyle, including cars, jewelry, and a vacation in Aruba. S.F. Chronicle | SFist
9.
It’s dungeness crab season in Northern California. On a recent Saturday night, there were no fewer than six communal crab dinners, attended by thousands, in Sonoma County alone. The winter tradition goes back more than a century but gained popularity in the 1960s when Portuguese social clubs hosted dinners to raise money for religious festivities. The New York Times published a photo story on one of Northern California’s most delicious traditions.
Southern California
10.
A right-wing campaign to uncover voter fraud in California took a bizarre turn over the weekend as Nick Shirley, the influencer who helped trigger a federal crackdown in Minneapolis, spread claims of voting shenanigans in San Diego. In an X post, Shirley said that more than 30 people used a UPS store as their primary residence on voter registration forms. In fact, the store occupies the bottom floor of an apartment complex, with dozens of units that share the same street address. Yet by Tuesday, the post had drawn more than 5 million views and a whirlwind of outrage that reached Congress and the Trump family. Daily Beast | KUSI
11.
During a period of architectural adventurism in the 1950s, an heir to the General Mills fortune built a futuristic guest house on the beach below his bluff-top home in La Jolla. The Mushroom House became a local landmark. But the owner of the structure, which is now unoccupied, has been fighting a losing battle to protect it from taggers and vandals. Heath Akers is vice president of GDC Construction, which handles repairs to the structure. “They’ve pried the front gate off, ripped apart the walls, and lit bonfires with the building materials,” he said. “Everybody seems to think it’s a public attraction and it’s not.” Times of San Diego
12.
DVDs are enjoying a comeback among Gen Z customers. The Los Angeles video rental store Vidiots opened in 2023, loaning out around 22,000 discs that year. In 2025, that figure more than doubled. Aidan Gannon, a 24-year-old cinephile, said he has collected 200 discs. “I want something I can put on my shelf,” he said. “I can go shopping in my closet and grab something and pop it in, instead of spending an hour scrolling through Netflix to find something and then just turning on the same TV show.” L.A. Times
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