Good morning. It’s Wednesday, May 21.
- Shasta County declares emergency over wolf attacks.
- Google takes next big step into artificial intelligence.
- And some San Diego cops are making $400,000 a year.
Statewide
1.
The release of “Original Sin,” the buzzy book chronicling the code of silence surrounding President Biden’s decline, is now reverberating in the California governor’s race. On Tuesday, Antonio Villaraigosa, the former L.A. mayor and candidate for governor, accused perceived rivals Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra of helping deliver the presidency to Donald Trump. “Voters deserve to know the truth,” he said. “What did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?” Politico | L.A. Times
2.
On Sunday, environmentalists held a paddle-out in Santa Barbara to commemorate the devastating May 2015 oil spill that killed hundreds of marine animals and sullied pristine beaches. To their horror, the next day a Texas oil company announced that it had resumed crude oil production in federal waters off the coast, 10 years to the day after the spill in the same area. Miyoko Sakashita at the Center for Biological Diversity called the timing a “slap in the face.” L.A. Times | KEYT | Edhat
3.
At California’s community colleges, nearly 300,000 immigrant students take free English classes. Some hope to integrate into American life, others to advance in their jobs. But a climate of fear over revoked visas and ICE raids has led many of these students to stop coming to class. “In the San Fernando Valley, one professor has lost about 15% of her enrollment this semester. In San Marcos, several classrooms abruptly transitioned from mostly in-person instruction to walls of Zoom squares,” CalMatters wrote.
Northern California
4.
Google appeared flat-footed after the release of ChatGPT in 2022. On Tuesday, the company sought to prove that it had caught up to competitors in the artificial intelligence race, unveiling an AI feature that makes interacting with its search engine more like having a conversation with an expert capable of answering almost any imaginable question. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, called it a “total reimagining of search.” Wall Street Journal | A.P.
- Google also unveiled a new real-time speech translator that emulates the speaker’s voice in another language. “It sounded scarily like me,” wrote tech columnist Nicole Nguyen. Wall Street Journal
5.
In 2019, Facebook announced a plan to spend $1 billion to fund 20,000 new homes in California, a sort of penance for its part in inflaming the housing crisis. Plaudits rained down. “Facebook didn’t have to do this,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at the time, “but they did the right thing.” Six years later, the company now called Meta appears to have quietly abandoned the initiative, having committed just 19% of its pledged funding. The last full-time worker on the project was fired in 2023. Mercury News
6.
Shasta County became at least the fifth Northern California county to declare a local emergency over wolf attacks on livestock. “This is not just a ranching issue — it’s a public safety issue,” Supervisor Corkey Harmon said. “These wolves are showing no fear of people and are attacking livestock near family homes.” The resolution makes two key demands of the state: relocate problem wolves and empower sheriffs to investigate wolf encounters. The state’s wolf population has swelled to as many as 70 individuals since a lone male crossed from Oregon in 2011. CBS News | KRCR
- You can now track collared wolves in California after the state introduced a live map designed to warn ranchers when the predators are nearby. Check it out.
Southern California
7.
Newly released video lent credence to the theory that the Palisades fire grew from the rekindled embers of a fire that burned six days earlier on New Year’s Day. “It falls under the category of a rekindle because you probably have an undiscovered ignition outside the border of the fire,” said Terry Taylor, a retired wildland fire investigator. “In effect, you already had another fire going, it just didn’t go anywhere until the winds kicked up.” See the side-by-side video for yourself. 👉 S.F. Chronicle
8.
Some police officers in San Diego are making more than $400,000 a year by logging extraordinary overtime hours, out-earning even the mayor and chief of police. Jason Costanza, who pulled in $433,000 in 2023, worked 3,151 hours of overtime that year, records showed. That meant he was working somewhere on the order of 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Police Chief Scott Wahl saw little cause for concern. “They put in a tremendous amount of hours,” he said. “They earn the money that they’ve made.” KPBS
9.
In March 2022, an Orange County police officer named Nicole Brown hurt her forehead while trying to handcuff an unruly suspect. A doctor cleared her to return to work the same day. But a week later, she told the department she was diagnosed with severe concussion syndrome and put on disability leave. According to prosecutors, Brown then claimed more than $600,000 in workers’ compensation — all while hitting the slopes at Mammoth Mountain, running two 5Ks, and dancing at a country music festival. She now faces 15 felonies. L.A. Times | KTLA
10.
If you left a pile of trash in a yard in Los Angeles, you’d get a $500 fine, noted Frank Lloyd, an Antelope Valley property owner. Yet illicit dumping has plagued the high desert where Lloyd lives for years. “Now we have hundreds of thousands of tons,” he said. The scale of illegal dumping has gotten so extreme that CalRecycle, the state agency in charge of waste, said it amounted to an emergency that is degrading the environment, causing fires, and threatening safety. LAist visited three notorious dumping sites.
11.
A decade ago, the Coachella Valley produced just 38 units of affordable housing a year. This year, affordable housing is planned or under construction in all nine of the valley’s cities. Much of the credit is owed to a dogged nonprofit called Lift to Rise that pledged to add nearly 10,000 affordable housing units by 2028. At last count, there were 9,300 in the pipeline. “It is notable progress in a state where the dire shortage of low-income housing can seem an intractable problem,” the Los Angeles Times wrote.
12.
A sculptor created a glittering green cactus from parts of a 1959 Cadillac. Roger Reutimann’s Cadillactus, installed last year along the main approach to Palm Springs Airport, has been a hit on Instagram. Perhaps best of all, the tail lights activate at night. designboom
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