Good morning. It’s Monday, Feb. 26.
- Tulare Lake is gone a year after its startling revival.
- Vehicle collision kills seven farmworkers near Madera.
- And photographers flock to Yosemite for firefall show.
Statewide
1.
“There’s no lake anymore.”
Tulare Lake, the long-dormant lake resurrected by epic rainfall last winter in the San Joaquin Valley, has now almost entirely dried up, leaving just a few square miles of standing water. Farming is returning to life, with tractors on the move and workers preparing the ground for planting. There’s also talk about how to get ready for the next flood, including a proposal to restore wetlands that could naturally contain floodwater. S.F. Chronicle
2.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday announced an advertising campaign in red states to combat proposals that limit access to abortion. The first television spot ran Sunday in Tennessee, where a state lawmaker is trying to make it a felony to transport a minor across state lines for an abortion. It shows a young woman handcuffed to a gurney with a “sexual assault evidence collection kit” nearby, crying out for help. “Don’t let them hold Tennessee women hostage,” the narrator says. Newsom has pushed to make California a legal “sanctuary” for abortions. Politico | L.A. Times
3.
“Essentially, we’re a power plant with zero emissions.”
Rising from a ridge overlooking the Pacific just up the coast from Santa Barbara, a group of 27 massive wind turbines is now delivering electricity to the grid after going live in late December. More than two decades in the making, the Strauss Wind Energy Project is the first wind energy project on California’s coast, generating enough electricity to power 36,000 homes. A local broadcaster took a tour. 👉 KEYT
4.
Firefall season is here.
For roughly two weeks each February, the setting sun enters the east-west Yosemite Valley at an angle that reflects its orange rays off the granite behind the 1,500-foot Horsetail Falls. When the weather and waterfall mist cooperate, it looks like a ribbon of lava. Photographers say the waterfall is flowing less abundantly than years past, but enough for some gorgeous scenes. See a few 2024 pictures below.
Northern California
5.
All but one of seven farmworkers who died in a vehicle crash near the Central Valley city of Madera on Friday were identified in the Spanish press over the weekend. The workers, all Latino men living in Kerman, were traveling in a van along a rural highway before colliding head-on with a truck, whose driver also died. A witness told police that the truck had been swerving. Several of the farmworkers were breadwinners for families left behind in Mexico. Juvenal Talavera, a 24-year-old husband and father to a son, was remembered by family as humble and hardworking. “I loved him,” his brother said. Univision (Spanish) | KFSN
6.
A developer wants to build a trio of towers in place of the historic ranch house that housed Sunset magazine’s former headquarters in Menlo Park. Thanks to the so-called “builder’s remedy,” which nullifies zoning laws when cities are out of compliance with housing mandates, there may be no stopping it, wrote urban design critic John King: “The juxtaposition is so crude as to be startling, the most flagrant case yet of trying to exploit the undeniable need to create more housing in established communities.” S.F. Chronicle
7.
Some parents have been exploiting their young daughters on Instagram, selling pictures of young girls in bikinis and leotards to an audience of men who expressed sexual interest in the children. Employees inside Meta warned the company about the problem last year, and offered two solutions: ban accounts that feature child models from using the pay feature and require accounts selling child-focused content to register themselves. Meta rejected both. Wall Street Journal
8.
Overwhelmed by theft, a San Francisco hardware store has resorted to what it’s calling a “one-on-one shopping experience.” Customers at Fredericksen Hardware in the Cow Hollow neighborhood are now greeted by a table blocking the entrance, where they must wait their turn for an escort to accompany them around the shop. Store manager Sam Black recalled the day they added the table: “This guy was walking by, pushing his bike, all hunched over. He kind of curved in, saw the table, curved back out and kept walking. It’s, like, case in point, right there. It’s crazy.” SF Standard
9.
The San Francisco Symphony’s upcoming production of Alexander Scriabin’s “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire” at Davies Symphony Hall will incorporate both colored lights and scents into the performance. Reporter Joshua Barone attended a test run. “If everything worked as planned,” he wrote, “Scriabin’s already sensuous music would, combined with the smells and lighting, take on an overwhelming power that [perfumer Mathilde] Thibaudet described as ‘like a drug’ that leaves you ‘stimulated from everywhere: your nose, your ears, your eyes.'” N.Y. Times
Southern California
10.
“She killed my kids. They aren’t at school. They are not playing sports. They are at the cemetery.”
Nancy Iskander said she felt a measure of solace a day after a jury convicted Rebecca Grossman of murdering two of her sons on Friday. Jurors in the high-profile case appeared to embrace the prosecution’s view that Grossman, the scion of a prominent medical family, was reckless and impaired by margaritas and Valium when she sped through a marked crosswalk in Westlake Village and fatally struck the two boys. Every day of the trial felt like another funeral, Iskander said: “We finally can move on. Finally.” L.A. Times
11.
When the Irvine Unified School District disputed that one of its students had dyslexia and denied special-education assistance, her parents sued. They hoped to reach a quick settlement. Instead, the district appealed every ruling in the parents’ favor all the way to federal appellate court, one step below the U.S. Supreme Court. Irvine Unified has now spent more than $1 million in legal fees fighting the family. “This is a broken system,” said Sasha Pudelski of the American Association of School Administrators. “It’s truly nightmarish and doesn’t work for anyone.” Wall Street Journal
12.
The number of Americans who claim Native American ancestry rose 86% between 2010 and 2020. For years, Cal State Northridge professor Alesha Claveria identified as a white woman who is passionate about Native American theater. Her story changed around 2021 when she described herself as having “mixed Chippewa, Sioux, Crow, and Norwegian heritage” in a contributor biography for a planned anthology. When the editor could find no evidence of Claveria’s native heritage, he removed her chapter from the book. The decision triggered a flare-up that divided Native American scholars. L.A. Times
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