Good morning. It’s Thursday, June 5.
- White House to pull $4 billion from bullet train.
- Police arrest a man in Palm Springs bombing.
- And the incredible peregrine falcons of Torrey Pines.
Statewide
1.
The Trump administration said it plans to yank $4 billion in federal funds from California’s bullet train after a review found “no viable path” toward completing the troubled line. A 310-page review released on Wednesday called the project a “story of broken promises,” citing budget shortfalls and missed deadlines. “We don’t want to invest in boondoggles,” said Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary. California Democrats portrayed the review’s findings as misguided and preordained. S.F. Chronicle | KQED
2.
California Democrats have devised a way to get around the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action for racial minorities in college admissions. Overwhelmingly approved in the Assembly, new legislation would allow the schools to give preference to descendants of slavery. “This bill is not about race. It’s about relationship to a legacy of harm,” said Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, the author. Analysts said the measure may cross the line into illegal discrimination. S.F. Chronicle
Northern California
3.
A man who confined and repeatedly raped an elderly woman in a Bay Area hotel room for two years during the pandemic was sentenced to 394 years in prison on Tuesday. The relationship between Ian Edard Kroe, 57, and the 74-year-old woman began as a friendship, said San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe: “Then suddenly this guy turns into a beast.” When police found the woman in 2022, she was naked, bruised, and unable to move on her own, prosecutors said. During sentencing, she said she “survived beyond all odds.” Mercury News | L.A. Times
4.
Reporter Heather Knight went to San Francisco’s Castro District to see how people are reacting to the Pentagon’s plan to scrub the name of gay rights icon Harvey Milk from a Navy ship. “I love this country,” said Harry Breaux, 80, “but I don’t love what’s happening to it.” He recalled shaking Milk’s hand in 1977. “I know what it’s like to be in a closet, or a cage, as I call it,” he said, adding that Milk helped make the Castro a place where the fear of being openly gay dissipated.
“I’m going to get emotional,” he said, his voice cracking. N.Y. Times
5.
“It was almost as if I’d slipped past an invisible shield and landed in a real-life version of Pleasantville, if Pleasantville existed in the middle of the woods.”
Graeagle, a tiny town on the banks of the Sierra Nevada’s Middle Fork Feather River, is little more than a cluster of quaint red cabins. The travel writer Julie Brown Davis said it might possibly be the happiest place in the Lost Sierra. SFGATE
Southern California
6.
A Washington state man was charged with helping to plot and carry out the May 17 bombing of a Palm Springs fertility clinic, the federal authorities said on Wednesday. Daniel Park, 32, supplied ammonium nitrate to the man who died carrying out the attack, Guy Edward Bartkus, and ran “experiments” with him in Bartkus’ garage, officials said. The pair bonded on the internet over a “shared belief that people shouldn’t exist,” said Akil Davis, the FBI’s assistant director in charge. Desert Sun | A.P.
7.
A year after San Diego drew national headlines for outlawing beach yoga classes, a federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled the crackdown unconstitutional, saying the wellness practice qualifies as protected free speech. The city had argued that the classes crowded public parks. But the judges noted that other sorts of group activities, such as tai chi or Shakespeare readings, were spared from the ordinance, raising the question of why yoga was singled out. “It feels good to be vindicated,” said Steve Hubbard, a yoga instructor. S.D. Union-Tribune | CBS 8
8.
Days after San Diego residents confronted ICE agents on behalf of undocumented immigrants targeted during a raid at an Italian restaurant, people from the same neighborhood gathered again — this time to block two proposed housing projects.
“What unfolded at this second protest was a perfect distillation of how wealthy, largely white neighborhood groups across California that profess to value inclusion too often use their sway to ensure that their neighborhoods remain unattainable to anyone who doesn’t already live there,” wrote columnist Sara Libby. S.F. Chronicle
9.
The California avocado dominated the U.S. market for decades. Then the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement opened the floodgates to cheaper Mexican avocados. Today, roughly 90% of the avocados consumed in California are imported, mostly from Mexico.
The Los Angeles Times profiled Norman Kachuck, a former neurologist who left medicine to grow avocados in San Diego County. He’s barely hanging on. “I’m stupid enough to not know when quitting is correct,” he said. “I just have this general sense of optimism — or hubris — that I can figure it out.”
10.
Not long before his death, the legendary director David Lynch was asked by the actress Natasha Lyonne for his thoughts on artificial intelligence. “Natasha,” he said. “This is a pencil.” Everyone, he went on, has access to a pencil. Likewise, everyone with a phone will be using AI. “It’s how you use the pencil,” he said. “You see?”
Vulture included the anecdote in a bleak piece on how “everyone is already using AI (and hiding it).”
11.
“This fierce peregrine mom was patrolling her territory to provide a safe airspace for her newly fledged babies. I thought she was going to attack a few gulls that flew close, but she decided to take a hard right and turn around at the last minute, offering a rare face-to-face moment with the camera.”
The wildlife photographer Sukhjot Singh captured an incredible video of a peregrine falcon known as Dragon Lady in San Diego’s Torrey Pines area. @singhsukhjot
12.
In 1946, not long after the end of World War II, the L.A. Times columnist Lee Shippey delivered a cri de coeur for Angelenos to mount a resistance to a new invading force: smog. By then, the “beast you couldn’t stab” had grown so menacing that it stung people’s eyes and throats. “Ours is a city in which miracles are so common we often fail to notice them,” Shippey wrote. If we let smog blot out the sun, he noted, “this wouldn’t be Los Angeles anymore.”
Shippey believed Los Angeles would meet the moment. Progress was agonizingly slow, but in time his faith was largely vindicated as pollution controls and technological advances made the city’s air far cleaner. A popular Instagram account recently recalled the worst days of L.A.’s smoggy past with a gallery of historical photos. Forgotten Los Angeles
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