Good morning. It’s Friday, April 11.
- The lavish lifestyle of California’s insurance chief.
- Activists who occupied Stanford office face felonies.
- And federal agents seek undocumented students in L.A.
Statewide
1.
The California Coastal Commission fined a Texas oil company a record $18 million on Thursday for defying orders to stop work on a pipeline along the Santa Barbara coast. “Sable’s refusal, in a very real sense, is a subversion of the will of the people of the state of California,” one commissioner said. The move sets the stage for a test of the beleaguered commission’s power to police the coast. Sable Offshore Corp. has accused the agency of overreach in court while arguing that its work is allowed under a county permit. “This continuing power grab must stop,” Trent Fontenot, a Sable executive, said on Thursday. KQED | CalMatters
2.
Ricardo Lara, California’s insurance commissioner, has been using what appears to be a campaign “slush fund” to pay for nearly $30,000 in meals and drinks at swanky restaurants and bars, an investigation found. On Jan. 15, his restaurant of choice was San Laurel in Los Angeles, from the famed chef José Andrés. Lara and a guest enjoyed a $700 culinary adventure that included a $16 grapefruit and two $90 bottles of white wine. The guest: Raul Vargas, CEO of Farmers Insurance Group, the state’s second-largest home insurer. SF Standard
- Another investigation found that Lara has taken at least 46 trips to places such as Bogotá, Paris, Singapore, Dublin, and Toronto since assuming office in 2019. His office failed to identify a business purpose for nearly all of them. ABC 7
3.
President Trump vowed on Thursday to withhold all federal funding to cities and states that limit cooperation between local law enforcement and immigrant agents, calling such jurisdictions “death traps.” That would appear to apply to California as a whole along with dozens of individual cities and counties across the state that have adopted sanctuary policies. Trump also tried to defund sanctuary jurisdictions during his first term but was largely blocked in court. Wall Street Journal | Bloomberg
4.
The New York Times assigned four reporters to a story on how Kamala Harris is plotting her return to politics. A few takeaways:
- She thinks she could have beaten President Trump if she had more time, the implication being that former President Biden should have quit the race earlier.
- She has been busy talking to a lot of people. The list includes Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Terry McAuliffe, Reid Hoffman, David Shor, and Ezra Klein.
- Some of her closest allies say she is leaning against another White House run and toward a campaign for California governor.
5.
Dispatches from the trade war:
- Around this time last year, Peter Navarro was reporting to prison. Now the California economist is the person most associated with the tariffs rocking the world besides President Trump. This week, Elon Musk called Navarro a “moron.” But he still has Trump’s loyalty. Wall Street Journal.
- Gov. Gavin Newsom is urging other countries to negotiate deals with California that exempt the state’s exports from reciprocal tariffs. “California is a stable, reliable partner. We want your business,” he said on Wednesday. Economists are skeptical about how much he can do. Politico
- Apple chartered cargo flights to ferry 600 tons of iPhones to the U.S. from India in an effort to beat Trump’s tariffs, sources said. Analysts expect iPhone prices to surge. Reuters
6.
For this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman talked with Olaf Groth, a futurist and professor at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Groth said California’s role as an innovation leader makes it especially vulnerable to President Trump’s seesawing trade war as investors flee high-growth tech firms. The market rallied after Trump’s Wednesday tariff pause, he noted. “But it’s a wild ride. It’s up and down and up and down, and it will likely stay that way, my hunch is, at least through the summer.”
Northern California
7.
Santa Clara County prosecutors on Thursday leveled felony charges against 12 pro-Palestinian protesters in connection with the June 5 takeover of the Stanford president’s office. Eight of those charged are Stanford students. District Attorney Jeff Rosen called the protest action “a calculated plan of destruction” in which activists wielded crowbars, broke windows, and splashed fake blood. Their political views were no factor in the criminal charges, which could carry years of incarceration, Rosen said: “Dissent is American. Vandalism is criminal.” S.F. Chronicle | KQED
8.
On April 11, 1943, a military sentry shot and killed a San Francisco chef named James Wakasa at Utah’s Topaz Relocation Center, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. Fellow prisoners raised a stone monument in his honor. For decades, it was thought to have been demolished, until a pair of archaeologists found it buried in the dirt near the spot where Wakasa died. To Topaz survivors and their descendants, the stone was all but a sacred object. So when it was sloppily yanked from the ground in a secret excavation, it felt like an old wound was reopened. High Country News told the fascinating account of “The Topaz Affair.”
Southern California
9.
Federal agents tried to enter two Los Angeles elementary schools this week to connect with five students alleged to have entered the country illegally, school officials said on Thursday. It was the first such attempt to enter an L.A. school since President Trump set his immigration crackdown in motion. The agents, who were denied entry to both schools, claimed to have permission from the families to check on their children’s well-being, according to schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho. That was a lie, he said. L.A. Times | EdSource
10.
The U.S. government told a court that it would retrain Border Patrol agents in California on constitutional prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures after a controversial January raid in Kern County. In the lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union accused the federal force of targeting people on the sole basis of looking Latino or like farmworkers. “The law doesn’t permit Border Patrol to assume that people are violating immigration law because they’re brown,” said Bree Bernwanger, an ACLU lawyer. CalMatters
11.
An escaped murder convict from Southern California resurfaced on Wednesday in Tijuana, where he fatally shot a Mexican police officer, officials said. Cesar Hernandez, 34, escaped from a prison van in Kern County last December, sprinting across across a field in an orange jump suit in a getaway that was caught on video. An elite Mexican police unit known as “the Gringo Hunters,” which specializes in capturing U.S. fugitives, tracked him to Tijuana and moved in for an arrest. They were met by bullets, and somehow Hernandez managed to escape again. The Guardian | KGET
- Surveillance video is believed to show Hernandez getting away in Tijuana. 👉 KFSN
In case you missed it
12.
Five items that got big views over the past week:
- Extreme woodland beauty, pristine isolated beaches, and ethereal inland waterways. The travel guide Wildsam recommended a fantastic five-day road trip through Northern California’s redwood country from San Francisco to Crescent City.
- For his book “California Houses: Creativity in Context,” design writer Michael Webb included 36 new homes that showcase the state’s pioneering spirit. Asked by an interviewer to pick his favorite home of all, Webb cited a small live-work space in San Francisco dubbed the “Light Box.” Wallpaper published 11 pictures.
- The New York Times Magazine created a visually stunning feature that explores what was lost along a single block destroyed in the January wildfires in Los Angeles.
- The best restaurant in the Bay Area is an Oakland soul-food spot called Burdell, according to a new ranking by the San Francisco Chronicle. “When critics from other cities come to town, we delight in watching their eyes roll back in their heads as they crunch their way through Burdell’s cheeky spin on chicken and waffles,” it wrote.
- A campground ensconced in old-growth forest along the Smith River; an Eastern Sierra spot where campsites include their own hot tubs; and a hideaway tucked into the red sandstone cliffs of the Mojave Desert. Outside magazine created a list of the “12 best campgrounds in California to ditch the crowds.”
Thanks for reading!
The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
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