Good morning. It’s Friday, June 10.
• | Kevin McCarthy says Republicans will issue own Jan. 6 report. |
• | California’s latest Covid surge shows signs of having peaked. |
• | And a Navy helicopter goes down a day after Osprey crash. |
Statewide
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Rep. Kevin McCarthy spoke to reporters in Washington on Thursday.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Hours before the Jan. 6 committee opened public hearings on Thursday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy denounced the proceedings as a farce and said Republicans would release an alternative report that targets Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pressed by a reporter on whether former President Trump bore responsibility for the Capitol attack, the Bakersfield lawmaker answered, “I thought everybody in the country [bore] some responsibility.” Another reporter asked him if President Biden’s election win in 2020 was legitimate. He declined to answer. Bloomberg | Yahoo News
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“It looks like our latest Covid surge has peaked.”
California’s coronavirus case rate fell 6% since last week, according to an analysis of data released Tuesday. But epidemiologists warned that new subvariants threatened to push infections numbers back up this summer. “I think we will see lots of infections,” said Dr. David Ho, of Columbia University, “but not necessarily more severe disease or deaths.” Mercury News | L.A. Times | CNN
California coronavirus tracker. 👉 Covid19.ca.gov
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Goats worked on a hillside near multimillion-dollar homes in Laguna Beach in 2020.
Mindy Schauer/O.C. Register via Getty Images
In the past, Californians relied on herbicide and human labor to clear brush ahead of fire season. But terrain could be challenging to navigate, and seeds simply germinated again in subsequent years. That’s why land managers are increasingly turning to an age-old weapon against wildfires: goats. Voracious eaters with iron-clad stomachs, a hundred goats can graze an acre a day, and their waste returns organic matter back to the soil, increasing its ability to hold water. National Geographic
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California cuisine is enjoying a moment in Europe, where every month seems to bring a new restaurant, chef, or menu from Los Angeles or San Francisco. Even in Paris, a city famously scornful of things American, a hotel recently opened Montecito, a restaurant inspired by Santa Barbara. Victor Garvey is the head chef at Michelin-starred SOLA, a portmanteau of Soho and Los Angeles, in London. “Californian food is an ethos,” he said. “A brightness, lightness, and freshness — We want to bring that to Europe.” L.A. Times
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Big rigs lined up at a truck stop in Barstow.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Along the highways of California are dozens of truck stops that serve as havens for the nation’s 550,000 long-haul truck drivers. They have arcades, showers, churches, and laundromats. With driverless trucks threatening to transform how the work is done, it’s an industry that seems bound to fade into history. Jamie Lee Taete produced a great photo essay on life at California’s truck stops. N.Y. Times
Northern California
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In 2012, California began using a top-two primary system, which puts all candidates in the same primary, as a way to maximize voter choice and minimize the power of parties. But it’s had some strange outcomes, such as what just happened in California’s 4th Senate District, stretching from Lake Tahoe to Death Valley. Voters there have reliably backed Republicans, including former President Trump twice. Yet two Democrats appear poised to advance to the Nov. 8 ballot because six GOP candidates spread out the vote. L.A. Times
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Google released a new tool on Thursday that uses real-time satellite imagery to depict what’s on Earth’s surface at super-high resolution. Dubbed Dynamic World, it displays nine color-coded land cover types such as buildings, grass, and crops in 10-by-10-meter squares. One powerful application is the visualization of landscapes altered by wildfire. The Verge
Below, see how the 2021 Caldor fire changed 350 square miles of the central Sierra from “trees” — green — to “scrub and shrub” — yellow.
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“The smell is like a dead animal but multiply that by 10 and then add fish smell to that and then feces.”
That’s how one person described the stench of a dead whale sprawled along a Bay Area shoreline; people living nearby said it made them gag. After two weeks of complaints, the city of Richmond finally dispatched an excavator to bury the unfortunate creature in the sand on Thursday. NBC Bay Area
Southern California
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A Navy helicopter crashed in Imperial County on Thursday, less than 48 hours after a Marine Osprey went down in the same county and less than a week after a Navy jet crashed in the Mojave Desert. No one was killed in the helicopter crash, officials said. All five Marines aboard the Osprey died. One of them was identified Thursday as Nathan Carlson, a 21-year-old from Illinois who wanted to be a Marine since he was 8 years old. On June 3, Navy pilot Lt. Richard Bullock was killed when his F/A-18E Super Hornet crashed near Trona. Desert Sun | Rockford Register Star
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Quazi Huda stood in front of a mural depicting Bangladesh’s independence.
Sean Maung
Bangledeshi immigrants began settling in a neighborhood a few miles west of downtown Los Angeles in the early 1960s, drawn in part by a nearby mosque. Bangledeshi markets and restaurants proliferated, and in 2010 a four-block stretch was officially designated Little Bangladesh. Here’s a nice video and photo essay by the street photographer Sean Maung. 👉 L.A. Taco
Food writers say one of the finest biryani spots in the city is Little Bangladesh’s Bangla Bazar & Restaurant. Eater Los Angeles
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On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman chats with Fernando Guerra, director of the Loyola Marymount University Center for the Study of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is sometimes characterized as a mess, but Guerro said that view overlooks extraordinary progress. Air pollution and per capita water usage have both plummeted, he noted: “I can go on and on about these policy successes. But what we do is we just take these for granted as a given and, ‘What else are you going to do for me?'”
In case you missed it
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Audrey Hepburn, 1953.
© Mark Shaw / mptvimages.com
Five items that got big views over the past week:
• | In 1953, Audrey Hepburn was 24 years old and had just won a best actress Oscar for her first major film role in “Roman Holiday.” LIFE posted photos of the actress in Los Angeles when her destiny as a Hollywood icon was still far from established. |
• | Politically, Alpine County is an island of blue in a sea of red. Straddling the Sierra just south of Tahoe, the county of roughly 1,200 residents is an exception to the California paradigm that rural equals Republican. L.A. Times |
• | Eulogies for San Francisco have become a staple of the national press. But in the wake of Chesa Boudin’s recall, the latest essay by Nellie Bowles is gorgeously written and provocative in its diagnosis: The city has succumbed to a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism. The Atlantic |
• | The reporter Conor Dougherty told his editor he wanted to write a profile of a NIMBY, “but make it feel like a profile of a cowboy or some other American archetype.” The result is a glimpse into the mind of Susan Kirsch, a retired teacher who has fought for 18 years to stop a condo project at the end of her block in Mill Valley. N.Y. Times |
• | A heat wave is expected to bake California through Saturday. Californiabeaches.com compiled a solid list of the state’s best hidden beaches. Included is Seal Cove in Moss Beach, reached through an enchanting cypress tree tunnel. 👇 |
Alexander Davidovich
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