In January, after two years of severe drought, Californians increased their water usage by 2.6%, compared to the same month in 2020 — the baseline year before the drought emergency was declared. In the Southern California desert, it was up 19%. The increased water use occurred as the state headed into its driest January and February on record. The new data suggests that many residents have not been persuaded by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pleas to cut back. Yet he has declined to issue a mandatory order. CalMatters | L.A. Times

“This proposal will bring shame to our city.”

In Visalia, a city of 140,000 in the conservative San Joaquin Valley, patients seeking to terminate a pregnancy at Planned Parenthood are referred to clinics an hour away. Last year, the nonprofit sought to open a clinic along a shopping corridor in the city, leaving its name off the application. But word got out anyway. After months of pushback, Planned Parenthood last week dropped the proposal but said it wouldn’t give up on finding a home in Visalia. Opponents vowed to keep fighting. Reuters

State lawmakers introduced a bill Tuesday that would hold tech companies liable for harming children. The bipartisan measure would let parents sue platforms like Instagram and TikTok that they believe their children become addicted to through design features that promote compulsive use. Significantly, the legislation is retroactive. Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham, a Republican, compared its potential effect to landmark legislation against Big Tobacco’s marketing to kids. Politico | Wall Street Journal

Last year, a popular camping recommendation site created an algorithm to sort through visitor reviews of 45,000 campgrounds in the U.S. It crunched data on the number, quality, length, and character of reviews and spit out a ranking of the top 10 American campgrounds. The No. 1 California destination: the Alabama Hills, a Martian landscape of jumbled boulders at the foot of the eastern slopes of the Sierra. The Dyrt

Pictured above, the Central Valley photographer Micah Diele brought a space suit with him on an Alabama Hills camping trip. He also cut a fun short film, “The Final Frontier.” 👉 YouTube (~1:30)

The columnist Ezra Klein delivered a searing critique of how liberals are hobbling efforts to tackle climate change, blocking even modest expansions of mass transit and affordable housing. Environmental laws such as CEQA, which was used to freeze enrollment at UC Berkeley, once stopped government from building too much, he wrote: “The core problem of this era is that the government is building too little, in defiance of all serious environmental analysis.” N.Y. Times (gift article)

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation Monday to stop enrollment cuts at Berkeley. EdSource | CalMatters

A March 4 memo from a San Francisco official revealed that the city is now boycotting most of the United States. In 2016, San Francisco passed an ordinance barring the city from doing business with companies headquartered in states with anti-LGBT laws. Similar ordinances were added for abortion and voting rights. The boycott list has now ballooned to 28 states — including surprises like Nevada, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin — constraining San Francisco’s ability to buy the things it needs to function. Mission Local

It’s not just free spirits and survivalists who are going off grid anymore. In Gold Country, plunging costs have led a growing number of homeowners to adopt systems that run entirely on solar panels and batteries. At the low end, they cost roughly the same as an entry-level Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. One advantage, said Alan Savage in Grass Valley: He never loses power, unlike PG&E customers. “I don’t think I’ll ever go back to being on the grid,” he said. N.Y. Times (gift article)

In 2018, Tammy Carpenter’s daughter was found shot to death along with a man in a wooded area of Shasta Lake. But police didn’t tell her. Carpenter, a Hoopa Valley tribal member, found out from a relative of the other victim. When she went to the police station, the officer who greeted her asked if she knew that her daughter was on drugs and homeless. Three years later, the murders remain unsolved. “Like all these missing or murdered native women, she doesn’t matter,” said Carpenter. Here’s a deeply reported look at California’s crisis of missing Indigenous women. 👉 National Geographic

On May 18, 2021, a high-ranking fire official in Los Angeles said a top commander, Chief Deputy Fred Mathis, appeared to be drunk while overseeing operations during a wildfire. Mathis admitted he’d been drinking. Yet an investigation commissioned by the city cleared him of wrongdoing. He’s since retired with a $1.4 million payout. Critics are outraged, calling the outcome typical of a department that grants special treatment to favored officers. L.A. Times | City News Service

A newly discovered saber-toothed predator that prowled the forests of what is now San Diego around 42 million years ago has been given the name Diegoaelurus, the San Diego Natural History Museum said Tuesday. Paleotologists said the bobcat-sized species had an all-meat diet that may have included rhinos and primates, using its serrated teeth like scissors to shear flesh. “It would have been a serious predator,” said study co-author Ashley Poust, “with a Swiss army knife of a mouth.” Scientific American | S.D. Union-Tribune

A Los Angeles startup wants to make deliveries from space. Inversion Space envisions storing hundreds, if not thousands, of earth-orbiting capsules in outer space. Important items such as artificial organs could then be delivered to an operating room within a few hours anywhere in the world. “And one day, a shortcut through space could allow for unimaginably fast deliveries — like delivering a New York pizza to San Francisco in 45 minutes.” N.Y. Times (gift article)

There’s a place in San Diego County where the flowers go on and on and on …

Carlsbad’s multicolored Flower Fields reopened to the public this month with Instagram-ready rows of yellow, orange, pink, and red across gentle slopes overlooking the Pacific. The flowers are ranunculuses, but they are unlike anywhere in the world, having been cultivated since the 1920s to favor unusual colors and multilayered petals. The bloom typically lasts through early May. California Sun