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Good morning. It’s Thursday, Oct. 24.
- How Californians are donating in presidential race.
- The remarkable transformation of Nicole Shanahan.
- And L.A. Times editorials editor quits in protest.
Statewide
1.
After a multimillion-dollar lobbying push, legislation signed into law last month allows Native American casinos to dispute the legality of rival gambling halls. At issue is whether the halls offer games to which the tribes have exclusive rights in California. The result could be the shuttering of gambling venues that provide thousands of jobs and crucial municipal tax revenue. “The casino keeps us afloat financially,” said Mayor Victor Farfan of Hawaiian Gardens. “There are real-world consequences to all of this.” N.Y. Times
2.
Across California, few communities have donated more money to Donald Trump than Kamala Harris over the last two years. In Redding, a city that went for Trump in the 2020 election, residents have given significantly more to Harris this election season. In parts of San Francisco and Los Angeles, donations to Harris surpassed those for Trump by orders of magnitude.
Those are among the insights gathered from a new highly detailed map that lets you explore how your neighborhood is giving to the presidential candidates. Washington Post
3.
Doctors at UC San Diego are using Apple Vision Pros to perform surgeries. While analysts say the mixed-reality headsets have been a commercial flop, they are showing promise in medical settings. During laparoscopic surgery, doctors usually operate while looking up at camera images projected on a screen, a feat of hand-eye coordination that is simplified by the headset. “We are all blown away,” said Santiago Horgan, a UC San Diego surgeon. “It was better than we even expected.” Time
4.
California and the US Forest Service have set a goal of thinning or performing controlled burns across more than 1,500 square miles of forest per year in Sierra Nevada wild lands that are overgrown and prone to combust. The enormous effort is giving rise to a crop of young companies that can monetize wood waste, creating biofuels, firewood, mulch, and other products. A Bloomberg report on the new burgeoning economy includes a great collection of photographs.
Northern California
5.
Until this year, Nicole Shanahan was a Democrat who had moved easily among the Silicon Valley elite — a lawyer, entrepreneur, and wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. She is now in the midst of a remarkable transformation, wrote the Washington Post, “tapping a vast divorce settlement from 2023 to remake herself as an influencer and self-described ‘warrior mom’ rallying independent women around fringe medical views — and former president Donald Trump.”
- When Post reporters began working on this story, Shanahan offered to pay them $500,000 to expose people she claimed were smearing her. They declined.
6.
A team of UC Berkeley chemists have invented a fluffy yellow powder, half a pound of which they say can absorb as much carbon dioxide from the air annually as a tree. The discovery, announced in the journal Nature on Wednesday, amounts to a “game-changer” in the fight against a warming planet, said Omar Yaghi, the lead author and a professor of chemistry. “It performs beautifully,” he said. The scientists say the substance could be produced by the ton for use in large-scale air capture facilities. L.A. Times | S.F. Chronicle
Southern California
7.
The day after a report revealed that the Los Angeles Times’ billionaire owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, had barred his newspaper’s editorial board from endorsing a candidate for president, the editorials editor announced her resignation on Wednesday. “This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what,“ Mariel Garza said. Public anger over the thwarted endorsement, which would have backed Vice President Kamala Harris, boiled over on social media, where users posted screenshots of subscription cancellations. Columbia Journalism Review | The Wrap
- Responding to the backlash on X Wednesday, Soon-Shiong said he had given the editorial board an opportunity to “draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate.” The board declined, he said, “and I accepted their decision.” @DrPatSoonShiong
8.
An influential California doctor said she withheld the results of a study on puberty-blocking drugs because she feared the results might fuel bans of youth gender treatments. The federally funded research led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, found that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress. “I do not want our work to be weaponized,” Olson-Kennedy said. Critics seized on the admission as evidence of a medical coverup. N.Y. Times
9.
For a recent NASA-funded study, scientists created a map of Southern California that shows concentrations of air pollution along with the locations of thousands of warehouses. The Inland Empire, where the number of warehouses has grown from a couple hundred in the 1980s to more than 4,000, is shown bathed in deep orange hues, indicating dangerous levels of particulate pollution linked to cardiovascular diseases, some cancers, and adverse birth outcomes. NASA Earth Observatory
10.
One report portrayed UCLA as a place that abets antisemitism, with Jewish students subjected to harassment, threats, and assault. Another asserted that the university devalues the lives Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs, who face overt racism and suppression at the hands of peers and administrators. Together the competing conclusions of two task forces — one focused on antisemitism and the other anti-Palestinian bias — painted a picture of a campus still riven by tensions connected to a war more than 7,000 miles away. L.A. Times | Wall Street Journal
11.
Southern California’s new state-of-the-art $2 billion arena, the Intuit Dome, has earned rave reviews. But some fans have been swearing the venue off over one source of frustration: the ticketing process. To enter the Intuit Dome, every patron is required to download the Intuit app, which requires you to surrender your address, email, and phone number. If you want to buy anything, you’ll have to give up your credit card information too. Cash is not accepted. The whole experience, wrote Joel Stein, “made me want to scream.” Washington Post
Endorsement scorecard
12.
On Nov. 5, voters will be asked to decide 10 ballot propositions in California’s latest exercise in direct democracy, or what the author Miriam Pawel once called the “initiative-industrial complex.”
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, newspaper editorial boards can offer guidance on the mess of special interests, deep-pocketed industry, and high-minded activism that drive the campaigns.
The California Sun tallied the endorsements made by six leading California papers — the San Diego Union-Tribune, Orange County Register, Los Angeles Times, Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, and Sacramento Bee — to create a scorecard for the propositions:
Proposition 2 (Borrow $10 billion for schools)
Proposition 3 (Protect same-sex marriage)
Proposition 4 (Borrow $10 billion for climate resilience)
Proposition 5 (Make local bond approvals easier)
Proposition 6 (Limit forced labor in prisons)
Proposition 32 (Lift the minimum wage to $18)
Proposition 33 (Expand local power to control rent)
Proposition 34 (A check on the AIDS Healthcare Foundation)
Proposition 35 (Locks in tax on managed health care plans)
Proposition 36 (Increase penalties for theft and drug crimes)
- Yes: 2 (Union-Tribune, Mercury)
- No: 3 (Register, Times, Bee)
Note: As of Wednesday, the Chronicle had made no endorsement in this race.
Dig deeper into the issues with voter guides by CalMatters, Politico, and KQED. The official state guide is here.
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The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
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