Newsletter
The California Sun gathers all the must-read stories about California in one place.
Good morning. It’s Wednesday, April 23.
- ICE agents round up day laborers at a Home Depot.
- San Franciscan becomes youngest self-made female billionaire.
- And Hollywood faces a crisis as productions flee.
Statewide
1.
California’s carbon credit market has morphed into a system that perpetuates noxious and environmentally hazardous practices at factory farms in other states. Under the program, farms in places like Missouri are incentivized to generate as much methane as possible from manure lagoons so they can collect carbon credits and sell them to oil companies. “This should be embarrassing for the state of California,” said Scott Dye, a sustainable-agriculture advocate. “It is rewarding companies that have a decades-long record of creating havoc on the environment here.” Washington Post
2.
Dispatches from the immigration crackdown:
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers swept into a Home Depot parking lot in Pomona on Tuesday morning and rounded up more than a dozen day laborers, witnesses said. Enraged, activists quickly organized a protest outside the store. “Our people should not be living in fear,” one speaker said. KTLA | NBC4
- A growing number of Southeast Asian immigrants are being detained after showing up for routine check-ins at ICE offices in Southern California. Many of them have been in the U.S. for decades, said Connie Chung Joe, the leader of a legal aid group: “It just breaks the community and their families apart.” L.A. Times
3.
Tesla on Tuesday reported a quarterly net income drop of 71%, a stunning slide caused in part by anger over Elon Musk’s polarizing role in the Trump administration. The bleak data followed a report last week that Tesla registrations had fallen 15% in California, in their sixth straight quarterly decline, even as sales of other electric vehicle brands have surged. Tesla’s share of all electric-vehicle registrations in California is now around 44%, down from 71% in 2022. Wall Street Journal | Bloomberg
4.
The new book “Notes to John” is drawn from writings Joan Didion made about sessions with her psychiatrist that were found after her death. In an Atlantic piece, the author Lynn Steger Strong faulted the impulse to pry into the great California essayist’s private thoughts:
“What we see of Didion in these pages is that, at least for three years, the sharp seer and brilliant stylist felt more desperate, less in control, in life than she ever did inside the books she published,” Strong wrote. “I’m not sure why we need a new book to know that.”
Northern California
5.
A tuition-free private school backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that serves more than 500 low-income students in the Bay Area announced on Monday that it will close. No explanation was provided, but the move comes as Mark Zuckerberg has pulled back from diversity initiatives in an effort to better align with the Trump administration. Critics portrayed it as a betrayal. “There’s a particular cruelty in building up hope in a community, forming deep bonds with students and parents, only to abruptly pull the rug out,” said Antonio López, East Palo Alto’s former mayor. Mercury News | Bloomberg | Redwood City Pulse
6.
A 30-year-old San Francisco tech entrepreneur has unseated Taylor Swift as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, according to Forbes. Born to Chinese immigrant parents, Lucy Guo grew up in Silicon Valley and began coding in middle school. At 19 years old, she dropped out of Carnegie Mellon University to become a Thiel Fellow — a program funded by Peter Thiel that encourages young people “to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” At 21, she co-founded Scale AI, which provides training data for artificial intelligence applications. She’s now worth about $1.25 billion. Forbes | S.F. Chronicle
- “It’s annoying when guys think that, ‘Oh you’re a girl so you’re not that technical.'” See Guo discuss her love of tech at age 19. 👉 WIRED/YouTube
7.
Sacramento has long harbored an inferiority complex — and a maniacal love of sports. So when the city got the chance to host the Athletics, if only temporarily, it grabbed the opportunity. It was a Faustian bargain, wrote sports journalist Dan Moore:
“Sacramento is a dignified underdog sports town that’s always had to scrap and claw not to be overlooked, and it understands well everything that sports can do to elevate a place. [A’s owner John] Fisher, on the other hand, is the most destructive owner in sports.” The Ringer
8.
San Francisco’s Vaillancourt Fountain has been an object of debate since its unveiling in 1970s. The renowned architecture critic Allan Temko was firmly in the “hate it” camp, once describing the 710-ton work as akin to something “deposited by a concrete dog with square intestines.” So some San Franciscans took heart when renderings for a new park at the site showed no trace of the fountain. The city insists no formal plan has been adopted yet. But fountain supporters are already mobilizing for a fight if it should come to that. S.F. Chronicle | SFist
Southern California
9.
Jeffrey Ferguson, the former Orange County judge who fatally shot his wife after an evening of drinking and arguing at their Anaheim Hills home two years ago, was convicted of murder on Tuesday, six weeks after his first trial ended in a deadlock. Ferguson, 74, had acknowledged firing his gun but insisted it was accidental. Just before he was taken into custody on Tuesday, Ferguson whispered into the ear of his adult son, who witnessed the killing and forgave his father: “It’s OK. Be strong.” KABC | L.A. Times
10.
Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, got a firsthand look at the polluted Tijuana River near San Diego on Tuesday and vowed to develop a “100% solution” to the environmental crisis. For decades, coastal communities have been plagued by untreated cross-border sewage from Tijuana that has made the air noxious and the beaches unsafe. “I can’t imagine living with it,” Zeldin said, reacting to the stench. “I am not going to stand before you right now and sugarcoat that that smell … can be tolerated.” S.D. Union-Tribune | L.A. Times
11.
The game show “The Floor” could easily be filmed in Hollywood, where plenty of studios are sitting idle. Instead, Fox flies the show’s host, Rob Lowe, and 100 contestants across the Atlantic Ocean to answer trivia questions in Dublin. “It makes more financial sense than filming in California,” the New York Times wrote. “In the past few years, as labor costs have grown after two strikes, producers of reality shows, scrappy indie movies and blockbuster films have increasingly turned away from Los Angeles to filming locations overseas.”
- In January, President Trump enlisted Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson to boost Hollywood productions. No one knows what they are doing. L.A. Times
12.
“No route. No rules. All passion.”
A decade ago, a German transplant to Los Angeles pitched an idea to a group of friends: What if we run from Los Angeles to Las Vegas? The Speed Project, or as some call it the “Burning Man of Running,” became a phenomenon. Late last month, runners from 30 countries arrived in Los Angeles to join one of the most secretive and dangerous unsanctioned races in the world. A reporter and photographer followed them on a 340-mile odyssey that featured a sandstorm, a wild dog attack, and lots of tears. Washington Post
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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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