Good morning. It’s Monday, March 18.
- San Francisco bus stop crash kills three family members.
- An ultramarathoner circumnavigates the Salton Sea.
- And a video tour of “the anti–Palm Springs house.”
Statewide
1.
California is still counting votes from the March 5 primary. Some of the latest developments:
- Gov. Gavin Newsom had portrayed his signature mental health measure, Proposition 1, as a sure thing. Yet despite no funded opposition, the measure is barely hanging on, with just 50.14% in favor. The uncertainty led Newsom to postpone his State of the State address, which had been scheduled for today. Politico
- Moderates dominated what was arguably the most consequential race in San Francisco: the battle for control of the Democratic County Central Committee, whose endorsements shape city politics. The shift was profound: In 2020, 22 of 24 seats went to progressives. This time, 18 of 24 seats went to moderates. S.F. Chronicle
- Long Beach voters approved a measure that gives the city’s hotel workers the highest minimum wage in the country: $23 per hour, with annual increases that will bring it to $29.50 an hour by 2028. Capital & Main
2.
In 2020, the University of California moved to abandon the SAT in admissions against the recommendations of its own faculty. Hundreds of other U.S. schools did the same, as the pandemic provided an opening to scrap a test that critics long depicted as racist. Since then, however, MIT, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Brown, Yale, and others have announced plans to reinstate the SAT after finding their applicant pools actually became less diverse. On Sunday, the L.A. Times editorial board urged the University of California to rethink its position.
3.
From the obituary pages:
- David Johnson, the first Black student of Ansel Adams, became known as one of the foremost chroniclers of San Francisco’s Black urban culture. He died on March 1 in Marin County at the age of 97. NPR
- Margaret Grade left her career as a neuropsychologist to open an inn near Point Reyes National Seashore and became a celebrated pioneer of farm-to-table cuisine. She died on Feb. 28 from complications related to injuries sustained in a car accident. She was 72. N.Y. Times
- Larry H. Parker, an auto-accident and personal-injury attorney whose television and billboard ads promising to “fight for you” made him a Southern California fixture, died on on March 6 in San Juan Capistrano. He was 75. N.Y. Times
4.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to tap Nicole Shanahan, a Bay Area lawyer once married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as his running mate in his bid for U.S. president, the media site Mediaite reported on Saturday. A senior Kennedy advisor registered the domain kennedyshanahan.com on March 13. Shanahan was an early backer of Kennedy’s bid, saying she admired his willingness to challenge the scientific establishment. “I do wonder about vaccine injuries,” she told the N.Y Times last month, while clarifying that she is “not an anti-vaxxer.” Mediaite | N.Y. Times
Northern California
5.
A sport utility vehicle plowed into a bus stop in San Francisco midday Saturday, killing three members of a young family — a married man and woman and their 1-year-old child — according to officials and witnesses, several outlets reported. A fourth member of the family, an infant, was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. “They were an amazing family,” a tearful friend told the S.F. Chronicle. The driver was also hospitalized. The cause of the crash was not disclosed. S.F. Chronicle | KGO
6.
“Giulia’s hit!”
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office released body-cam video from a March 4 shootout that opened “a rare public window into the fear, courage, camaraderie and chaos on display as deputies confront and pursue a man who initially had them outgunned and surprised,” the Press Democrat reported. Deputies responding to a report of an armed man making threats found themselves diving for cover as the suspect, 53-year-old Luis Cervantes, fired more than 50 rounds with an AK-47-style rifle. Fifteen minutes later, Cervantes was dead and a deputy was clinging to life after being run over by a fellow deputy. Press Democrat | KGO
- See the video. 👉 YouTube (~16 mins)
7.
At a recent dinner party for artificial intelligence doomers in Berkeley, people chatted about the potential for A.I. to annihilate humankind while munching on Impossible beef gyros. Among them was an authority on quantum computing, a former OpenAI researcher, and the head of an institute that forecasts the future. The host, Katja Grace, an A.I. researcher, acknowledged her uncertainty, estimating the likelihood that machines destroy us at between 10% and 90%. Still, she went on, “a 10% chance of human extinction is obviously, if you take it seriously, unacceptably high.” New Yorker
8.
Gil Howard, an 82-year-old retired professor, is the go-to driving instructor for women in Modesto’s Afghan community. He started to see teaching as a calling, offering lessons free of charge, after seeing what a difference driving made in their lives. “According to local lore,” wrote journalist Miriam Jordan, “thanks to ‘Mr. Gil,’ as he is known in Modesto, more Afghan women likely drive in and around the city of about 220,000 than in all Afghanistan.” N.Y. Times
9.
In 2021, an Oakland skateboarder named Ben Tolford found a dozen binders of old Kodachrome slides next to a trash heap. The images — a visual record of Oakland in 1970s and 80s that had been stolen and discarded — turned out to be the work of Raymond Cooper, a sailor, businessman, Black Panther, and avid photographer who died in 2000. Tolford tracked down Cooper’s daughter, who was overjoyed to be reunited with the photos. Now highlights from the collection are on display in an Oakland gallery. KQED
- See photos from the Cooper collection. 👉 SFGATE | @eastbay_yesterday | @eastbayphotocollective
Southern California
10.
A Seattle-area man accused of raping a child in 2008 faked his death by jumping off a bridge then lived under an alias as a handyman in a downtown Los Angeles building, reports said. The shocking truth about Christian Basham came to light after he died on Feb. 26. The Los Angeles County medical examiner uncovered his true identity and informed the authorities in Bremerton, where Basham was presumed dead. He skipped a court appearance and was seen leaping from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. His car was found nearby with a suicide note inside. A.P. | KABC
11.
He goes by Irondad.
A 49-year-old ultrarunner named William Sinclair ran the entire circumference of Southern California’s Salton Sea, roughly 92 miles, to draw attention to the environmental and health crisis posed by the dwindling inland lake. Sinclair cut a post-apocalyptic visage among the people he encountered: Dressed in all black, he wore a gas mask to block dust and a pair of snowshoes strapped wing-like to his back, allowing him to traverse stretches of mudflats. The Guardian
12.
When the architect Brett Woods built a home for his family in the Palm Springs desert in 2020, he moved the massive surrounding boulders out of the way, then rolled them back into place. He called the monolithic brass-and-glass structure “the anti–Palm Springs house,” making it about the natural environment “without reference to the Rat Pack or pink flamingos.” Woods gave an architecture magazine a video tour. YouTube (6 mins)
Get your California Sun T-shirts, phone cases, hoodies, mugs, and hats!
Thanks for reading!
The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
Make a one-time contribution to the California Sun.
Give a subscription as a gift.
Get a California Sun mug, T-shirt, phone case, hat, or hoodie.
Forward this email to a friend.
Click here to stop delivery, and here to update your billing information. To change your email address please email me: mike@californiasun.co. (Note: Unsubscribing here does not cancel payments. To do that click here.)
The California Sun, PO Box 6868, Los Osos, CA 93412
Wake up to must-read news from around the Golden State delivered to your inbox each morning.