Good morning. It’s Thursday, Jan. 23.
- Justice Department targets sanctuary cities.
- Sonoma State University announces painful cuts.
- And a new wildfire explodes north of Los Angeles.
Statewide
1.
The Justice Department ordered criminal investigations into local officials who refuse to help the Trump administration carry out its crackdown on illegal immigration. The move, outlined in an internal memo dated Tuesday, sets the stage for a showdown with “sanctuary” cities and states, such as California, that limit cooperation between local police and federal immigration agents. “This is a scare tactic, plain and simple,” said state Attorney General Rob Bonta. During Trump’s first term, federal courts upheld California’s laws and blocked his attempt to withhold funding from sanctuary cities. Bloomberg | S.F. Chronicle
2.

After the U.S. Border Patrol conducted surprise raids in Kern County this month, the agency described the operation as a “targeted enforcement” aimed at undocumented immigrants with criminal records. Locally, few people appear to believe that. Officers raided places where farmworkers gather: a Home Depot, a Chevron Station, stops along Route 99. “They definitely seemed to be targeting agricultural workers and day laborers,” said Casey Creamer, the leader of a trade group for citrus growers. Columnist Michael Hiltzik said the raids offered a preview of the chaos that awaits California’s immigrant workforce. L.A. Times
3.

There are higher perches in Yosemite, but few offer a more exquisite vantage on the park than Clouds Rest. Some Yosemite regulars say the 360-degree panoramas afforded atop the 9,926-foot dome surpass even those of its more famous neighbor, Half Dome, which sits more than 1,000 feet lower. Backpacker magazine included Clouds Rest in a feature on hikes “that will make your palms sweat.” It wrote: “You won’t be on top of the world, but with a sea of granite, evergreens, and cobalt water in every direction, you’ll feel like it.”
Northern California
4.
Sonoma State University announced on Wednesday that it will eliminate six academic departments, close its entire athletic department, and fire more than 60 faculty and staff to close a $24 million budget hole. The extraordinary cuts shocked the campus community. One professor called them “capricious and arbitrary”; another urged state lawmakers to intervene. “You have a community that woke up this morning and its world was turned upside down,” said David McCuan, a political science professor. Press Democrat | S.F. Chronicle
5.
David Misch, convicted of brutally murdering two young women in 1986, began singing “99 Bottles of Beer” during his sentencing in a Bay Area courtroom on Tuesday, interrupting victims’ family members as they tried to express their loss. About two bars into the song, Judge Paul Delucchi had Misch removed from the courtroom. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison on top of an earlier life sentence for another murder. In a statement, prosecutors called his courtroom behavior remorseless and “reprehensible.” Mercury News | CBS Bay Area
6.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic, predicted that AI would surpass human capabilities by 2027. “I think it’s plausible it could be longer than that,” he said during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I don’t think it will be a whole bunch longer than that when AI systems are better than humans at almost everything. Better than almost all humans at almost everything. And then eventually better than all humans at everything, even robotics.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman recently made a similar prediction. Ars Technica
7.

In the early 1980s, someone bought a bag filled with hundreds of rolls of unprocessed film at auction. The film eventually reached two Bay Area historians, who discovered that it contained a remarkable record of the Bay Area between 1966 and 1970, captured by a talented photographer. There was a young Carlos Santana, Black Panther rallies, and counterculture figures such as Timothy Leary and Jerry Garcia. The photographer’s identity remained a mystery. But amateur sleuths recently found a clue: It points to Agnès Varda, a late French filmmaker whom Martin Scorsese once called “one of the gods” of filmmaking. S.F. Chronicle
- See more photos from the archive.
8.
At any given time in California, there are more than 40,000 children in the state’s foster system and a chronic shortage of volunteer families prepared to take them in. Then there are the Macdowells, a couple in Redding who just can’t seem to say “no.” Since fostering their first child in 1977, Raelene and Ted Macdowell have taken in so many children that they’ve lost count. “We’re like 620 or 630 some,” Raelene said. Family reunions are a madhouse. KRCR did a short television segment on the family.
Southern California
9.

A new wildfire erupted north of Los Angeles, near Castaic Lake, Wednesday morning and exploded across nearly 16 square miles of mountain terrain, shutting down Interstate 5 and prompting evacuation orders for more than 50,000 people. By nightfall, firefighters were getting a handle on the Hughes fire thanks to an overwhelming aerial assault, officials said. After two weeks of fires across the region, the latest scare was difficult to bear, said Jonathan Hatami, a county prosecutor who raced to collect his kids from a threatened school. “You had some parents crying,” he said. L.A. Times | L.A. Daily News
- In an interview that aired Wednesday, President Trump called for blocking fire relief to California “until they let water flow down,” citing falsehoods about the state’s water system as his reason. Washington Post
10.
Crews are still trying to find 22 people who remain unaccounted for in the ashy rubble of thousands of destroyed homes across Los Angeles. Each of them lived in areas devastated by the Palisades and Eaton fires, and none of them has been seen since. Almost all of the missing are elderly or suffer from mobility problems. In 11 cases, human remains have been uncovered in the wreckage of buildings where the missing people lived. But in other cases, no trace has been found. “Their fates remain a mystery, and their families are left in limbo,” the Washington Post wrote.
11.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed price-gouging charges against a Los Angeles County real estate agent on Tuesday amid widespread reports of landlords hiking their prices in response to surging demand from fire victims. Mike Kobeissi, who bills himself as La Cañada Flintridge’s top agent, was accused of raising the price of a property by 38% after a couple who lost their home in the Eaton fire submitted a rental application. “May this announcement serve as a stern warning to those who would seek to further victimize those who have lost everything,” Bonta said. L.A. Times | LAist
12.

Normally, zigzagging suffices to get trains across difficult terrain. But in rare cases, only a loop will do. So it was that in 1876 the Tehachapi Loop was put into service to allow passage through the mountains separating Bakersfield from points south. An engineering marvel, the track spirals upward for nearly three-quarters of a mile, gaining almost 80 feet in elevation before passing over itself. The travel writer Randy Diamond went to see it for himself: It was “pure amusement,” he wrote, “like observing a massive model railroad set that had come alive.” SFGATE
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