Good morning. It’s Monday, April 1.
- Motorists trapped after roadway crumbles in Big Sur.
- Videos show Assembly candidate boasting of Jan. 6 riot.
- And locals name nine must-do experiences in San Diego.
Statewide
1.
California’s fast-food wage law kicks in today, meaning more than half a million workers will start getting paid at least $20 an hour, among the highest minimum wages in the country. While the change will provide more financial security for a typically low-paying profession, franchise owners said they will be forced to raise prices and kill jobs. Alex Johnson, who owns 10 Auntie Anne’s Pretzels and Cinnabon restaurants in the Bay Area, said the wage hike would cost him about $470,000 a year. “I have to consider selling and even closing my business,” he said. A.P. | N.Y. Times
2.
Federal managers have announced plans to severely restrict or even cancel the salmon fishing season for the second straight year. For fishers whose livelihoods depend on catching salmon, it’s a devastating blow. “They’re literally killing the salmon fleet,” said Chris Pedersen, a Half Moon Bay fisherman who has been catching salmon since he was a boy. He blames water managers who send too much water to farms, strangling the state’s rivers. When salmon suffer, he said, “you’re robbing us as fishermen.” L.A. Times
3.
Vice President Kamala Harris has moved into a starring role as left-leaning voters question President Biden’s age and leadership. Biden has defended abortion rights, but expressed uneasiness with the procedure. Harris spoke in much more assertive terms during a stop at a Planned Parenthood center in Minneapolis, believed to be the first visit by a sitting vice president to an abortion clinic. “Everyone get ready for the language,” she said. “Uterus.” The crowd broke into laughter. “That part of the body needs a lot of medical care from time to time.” Reuters
Northern California
4.
Last November, black smoke filled the sky after open flames shot from four smokestacks at a Chevron refinery on the edge of Richmond. But the city’s primary news outlet, The Richmond Standard, didn’t cover the flare. Nor did it report on the 2021 Chevron refinery pipeline rupture that dumped more than 700 gallons of diesel fuel into San Francisco Bay. “And there’s a reason for that,” wrote reporters David Folkenflik and Miranda Green. “Chevron owns The Richmond Standard.” NPR
5.
Roughly 1,600 motorists were stranded overnight in Big Sur after a portion of Highway 1 crumbled into the sea during torrential rains on Saturday. Some motorists slept in their cars while others found lodging along the highway, which had other closures because of rockslides. On Sunday, officials were able to evacuate many of the waiting motorists around the damaged section in guided convoys. Officials gave no estimate of when the highway might reopen. SFGATE | S.F. Chronicle
6.
Denise Aguilar Mendez, a Republican Assembly candidate in the Central Valley, says she didn’t join the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But a review of social media posts and videos suggests otherwise. In an Instagram video, Mendez stares into the camera and wipes a tear. Her voice trembles. “The revolution is here, guys. I mean, what we witnessed today was absolutely life-changing,” she says at one point. And later: “We stormed the Capitol, and patriots broke open the doors.” USA Today
7.
At Stanford University, the debate over Gaza has assumed a menacing character. Students have reported being spat on. Swastikas have been scrawled in dorms. “We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” a group of students told administrators after a lecturer minimized the Holocaust and sought to justify the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. The student journalist Theo Baker spent months investigating “the war at Stanford.” The Atlantic
8.
A month after moving from Sacramento to San Francisco, the opinion columnist Emily Hoeven has fallen in love with the city, she wrote: “Yes, San Francisco is entrenched in one of the most challenging moments in its history. To hear many people tell it, the city is a ghost of its former self. And yet, even in its diminished state — record-high office vacancy, shuttered storefronts, an increasingly devastating drug overdose death toll — the city still pulses with vitality.” S.F. Chronicle
Southern California
9.
In Hollywood productions like “Wonka” and “Bridgerton,” history is reimagined as a multiracial dream world. The portrayals, wrote Kabir Chibber, call to mind the incoherence of Google’s artificial-intelligence model, which was trained to produce Native American founding fathers and Black Nazis: “It’s striking to think that humans working in the arts have been making the same choices. The past is messy, and depicting it can be unsettling. But understanding that is what separates us from robots.” N.Y. Times Magazine
10.
In 1975, the Los Angeles artist Judy Baca had a vision to create the longest mural on the planet. The result is a half-mile epic along a flood control channel in North Hollywood that tells an unromanticized history of California — including images of Indigenous removal, Japanese internment, and mass deportation. A new short documentary from the L.A. Times tells the story of the “Great Wall of Los Angeles,” an ongoing project that became one of the city’s great cultural landmarks. YouTube (~7 mins)
- The L.A. Times short documentary “The Last Repair Shop,” about craftspeople who repair musical instruments for L.A. schoolchildren, won an Oscar. The accolade brought a wave of donations. Washington Post
11.
An outdoor gallery of dozens of soaring Chicano artworks.
Wrinkled bluffs where the rarest of American pines take root.
And a monastery-like research center overlooking the Pacific.
The former editor of San Diego Magazine, Marie Tutko, consulted with local tastemakers to create a list of nine must-do experiences in Southern California’s quintessential beach city. National Geographic
In case you missed it
12.
Here’s a catch-up on headlines you may have missed from the last week:
- A mountain lion killed a 21-year-old man and wounded his 18-year-old brother in a remote area northeast of Sacramento, in the first fatal cougar attack in California in two decades. A.P. | NBC Bay Area
- Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for stealing customers’ money. Just 18 months earlier he was a titan of the corporate world. N.Y. Times | Wall Street Journal
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tapped Bay Area tech attorney Nicole Shanahan as his vice presidential nominee. Shanahan, former spouse of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, brings a much-needed source of financial support. N.Y. Times | S.F. Chronicle
- A former Caltrain executive and a former contractor for the transit agency used public funds to build two apartments for themselves inside train stations, officials said. YIMBYs were delighted by the men’s ingenuity. SF Standard | Mercury News
- Also: federal agents raided Sean Combs’ Los Angeles and Miami homes; Gov. Gavin Newsom granted clemency to dozens of inmates; L.A.’s Broad museum announced a $100-million expansion; Shohei Ohtani called his former interpreter a liar; and Guy Fieri was named honorary mayor of Ferndale.
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