Good morning. It’s Monday, July 7.
- Marin County family among the missing in Texas flood.
- Los Angeles projects stall as workers go into hiding.
- And “theatrical vignettes” of 1970s California beach life.
Northern California
1.
Rescue crews recovered the bodies of seven people who were missing after a fireworks warehouse exploded in rural Yolo County last week, authorities said on Sunday. No names were released, but families identified several of the victims as employees of the warehouse. Lupe Melendez-Mendoza said her son, Joel Melendez, 28, was among the missing. He was married with a second child on the way. “I don’t even know how to move on from this or continue my life,” she said. “I feel like I’m dead already. I can’t understand this.” A.P. | KCRA
- Separate fireworks explosions in Southern California left at least three people dead, including an 8-year-old girl, reports said. A man was arrested in connection with the girl’s death. NBC Los Angeles | O.C. Register
2.
A Marin County couple and their son are among the dozens of flood victims missing in Central Texas. Friends and family members said Mark Walker, 51, Sara Walker, 50, and Johnny Walker, 14, were staying at a house along the Guadalupe River in the community of Hunt. The couple’s 16-year-old daughter Ellie, who attended a nearby camp, was safe. Kathy Walker, Mark’s mother, said the river house had been swept away. “It’s impossibly hard right now,” she said. “It feels like there’s a hole in my stomach. It hurts.” S.F. Chronicle | KGO
3.
Rationalists — an extremely online group of tech and philosophy nerds in the Bay Area — like to talk about a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. It imagines that a future superintelligence may keep track of its enemies and punish them. Ziz LaSota could not stop thinking about it. “Eventually I came to believe that if I persisted in trying to save the world,” she wrote, “I would be tortured until the end of the universe by a coalition of all unfriendly A.I.s.” The New York Times wrote about the beliefs that animated the cult-like “Zizians,” who have been linked to six killings.
4.
San Francisco progressives have watched the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, with envy. San Francisco has pivoted to the political center in recent years, electing business-friendly Democrats to the mayor’s office, Board of Supervisors, and local Democratic Party. Sidelined progressives hope Mamdani represents not a fluke, but a harbinger of another pendulum swing. “His race shows the times are changing in some respects,” said Dean Preston, a democratic socialist. Politico
5.
In 1891, a wealthy San Franciscan named Kate Birdsall Johnson hired one of the world’s greatest artists to paint 42 of her cats. Having never painted a feline, the Austrian artist Carl Kahler spent the next few years living at Johnson’s summer estate in Sonoma, studying her cats, which were said to occupy an entire mansion floor. The result, an 8.5-foot-wide masterpiece titled “My Wife’s Lovers,” depicted the cats lounging in a silky Renaissance tableaux. It became a huge hit, with thousands of prints sold. Artnet recently told the story of “history’s most fabulous cat painting.”
Southern California
6.
“Framers and landscapers are abandoning job sites. Renovations of retail shops have stopped midway. Real estate developers say they’re struggling to find crews to keep projects on track in a sector that relies heavily on immigrant labor.”
Los Angeles was already struggling to rebuild after the most destructive wildfires in its history. Now, President Trump’s deportation campaign has driven workers crucial to that project into hiding, Bloomberg reported.
7.
Other dispatches from the deportation push:
- Cynthia Olivera is a Canadian national whose parents brought her into the U.S. illegally at age 10. For 25 years, she built a life in Los Angeles, marrying and raising three children. She’s now in ICE custody “pending removal to Canada.” She and her husband, Francisco Olivera, a U.S. citizen, both supported Donald Trump. “We feel totally blindsided,” he said. KGTV | Newsweek
- Immigration enforcement forces didn’t let up on July Fourth; they arrested workers at a car wash in West Hollywood and a food vendor in front of a Los Angeles Target. NBC Los Angeles | L.A. Times
- Chris Garcia’s mother has been too afraid to operate her tamales stand in Pasadena. So he’s been doing it for her. He’s 14 years old. Customers have been lining up in a show of support. “It’s a lot,” Chris said of the response. “But I’m grateful for it.” L.A. Times | Pasadena Star-News
8.
California’s largest wildfire of 2025, ripping through grasslands near the Carrizo Plain National Monument since igniting last Wednesday, spread to more than 125 square miles as of late Sunday. That’s an area more than twice the size of San Francisco, but the Madre fire is also remote, putting relatively few structures in the path of danger. Fire officials said a firefighting force of nearly 1,400 personnel had begun to gain an upper hand on the blaze Sunday, lifting containment to 30%. L.A. Times
9.
Since 2023, a law enforcement task force in Los Angeles County has targeted both ends of the retail theft market: the thieves and the “fences” who buy stolen goods for pennies on the dollar. In February, deputies raided two bodega-style shops in downtown L.A. and found what appeared to be shoplifted shaving cream, sunscreen, and mouthwash — along with $1 million in cash inside a safe. The owners, a married couple, insisted they never knowingly bought stolen goods. Lt. Derek White was skeptical: “If you’re buying something that costs $50 for $3,” he said, “you know.” L.A. Times
10.
A man admitted to fatally dragging his dog behind his Jeep Cherokee in San Diego County last week in what Animal Services called “a horrific act of animal cruelty.” Joseph Holland, 58, told officials he forgot that he tied the animal to his vehicle after making a brief stop. He was “extremely remorseful,” said Chuck Westerheide, an Animal Services spokesman. Even so, Holland was expected to face a criminal charge of cruelty to animals. City News Service
11.
A police helicopter captured video of a harrowing rescue of 10 swimmers in distress during in what lifeguards described as a “monster rip current” in Newport Beach on July Fourth. The powerful current, a channel of water that forms near the beach and runs out to sea, dragged the beachgoers in a zigzagging pattern well past a rock jetty. All told, Newport Beach Lifeguards said the city’s lifeguards performed 350 rescues on Friday alone. Surfer magazine | KABC
- See the video. 👉 Lifeguard Project
12.
In 1975, the photographer Tod Papageorge lugged his clunky medium-format camera to the beach to capture the beautiful Los Angeles light and the stripped-down bodies basking in it. Incredibly, few people seemed to pay him much attention. “I just would stand still and pretend I didn’t exist, and eventually people seemed to accept the fact that I didn’t exist, that I’d somehow spontaneously combusted,” he recalled. The New Yorker revisited Papageorge’s “theatrical vignettes” of 1970s Southern California beach life.
Corrections
An earlier version of this newsletter said incorrectly that a woman detained by immigration agents in Southern California had “voted” for Donald Trump. She was only said to have supported Trump.
The July 3 edition of the newsletter gave an incorrect location for the town where a warehouse explosion occurred. Esparto is roughly 30 miles northwest of Sacramento, not 30 miles northeast of Sacramento.
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