Good morning. It’s Monday, Dec. 30.
- California leaders are warned over sanctuary laws.
- Shasta County Circle K sells $1.2 billion lottery ticket.
- And Googie buildings become an endangered species.
Statewide
1.
A legal group led by Stephen Miller, an advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, sent letters to California officials threatening them with “criminal” liability should they resist deportation efforts. Among the recipients were California’s attorney general, Los Angeles’ mayor, and the chair of San Diego County’s board of supervisors. The notices followed a similar warning by Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan. “Don’t test us,” he said on Fox News. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass accused Miller of misreading the law. Los Angeles magazine | CalMatters
- San Francisco leaders found one rare patch of common ground with Trump: fentanyl deportations. Bloomberg
2.
When California set a $20-an-hour wage floor for fast-food workers, business groups and Republican politicians declared it a predictable fiasco. This month, Trump echoed that assessment. “In California, they raised it up to a very high number, and your restaurants are going out of business all over the place. … It’s had a very negative impact,” he said in an interview with NBC News. “Except it hasn’t,” wrote the Atlantic: “In the six months after California’s new minimum wage came into effect in April, the state’s fast-food sector actually gained jobs.”
3.
“My parents wedding photos”
“A necklace that my kids got for me”
“Letters from my grandmother before she passed away”
As municipalities across California embraced sweeps of homeless encampments, officials pledged to carry them out humanely. But people’s belongings — including precious journals, pictures, and mementos — are commonly thrown away. ProPublica gave notecards to homeless people so they could explain in their own words the devastation of such losses.
4.
California cannabis growers use prohibited chemicals on their crops so casually that they include the treatments in their monthly pesticide use reports to the state. There is no evidence that regulators take any action. The practice is one part of a troubled supply chain that has resulted in more than half of cannabis smoking products in California’s legal market containing chemicals for which there is no public safety monitoring, a Los Angeles Times analysis found.
Northern California
5.
Since the 2018 Camp fire burned most of Paradise to the ground, residents have rebuilt some 2,500 homes. Some critics have portrayed the decision to live in the fire-prone foothills as an exercise in human folly. But many of the Paradise homes have adhered to such strong wildfire-safety measures that one insurer is now planning to issue hundreds of new policies — and it’s trying to convince others to do the same. “Paradise has figured it out,” said Victor Joseph, president of Mercury Insurance. S.F. Chronicle
6.
Someone bought a winning lottery ticket worth $1.2 billion on Friday at a Circle K in Cottonwood, a little town outside Redding in Shasta County, lottery officials announced. The chances of winning were about the same as reaching into a bowl filled with slips of paper bearing the names of every person in America and pulling out the name Barack Obama. The winner was not identified, but the store owners, who stand to collect $1 million, were celebrating over the weekend. “Everybody knows about it. Everybody’s excited,” said Ishar Gill. KRCR | Record Searchlight
7.
As Alphabet’s Waymo scales up its self-driving car service in San Francisco and Los Angeles, passengers are reporting a new form of harassment: strangers interfering with their robot chauffeur. Traveling by robotaxi can turn riders into sitting ducks as people follow, obstruct, or attempt to enter a driverless vehicle. Elliot, a tech worker in San Francisco, recalled how a man with a knife tried to break into his robotaxi at a red light. Unable to slam on the gas and get away, he resorted to yelling at him through the window. Washington Post
8.
After experiencing drought conditions for several years, Eric Haas, an education professor at Cal State, East Bay, hired a contractor to install a system that captures rainfall and “used” household water at his home in Oakland. The collected water could then be diverted to water the yard and fill toilets. His household now consumes two-thirds less water, he wrote in an essay for The Guardian: “It wasn’t hard and the whole project took about a week.”
9.
A Santa Cruz surfer, Alo Slebir, caught a wave at Mavericks two days before Christmas that several surfing professionals are calling the largest ever ridden at the legendary big wave spot near Half Moon Bay. The wave, fueled by the destructive storm that pummeled the Santa Cruz coast on Dec. 23, appeared to surge as high as 70 feet, according to Ryan Craig, a photographer for SURFER magazine. Grant Baker, a three-time big wave champion, declared it “a new world record.” SURFER magazine | SFGATE
- See Slebir’s epic ride. 👉 @bigwavechallenge
Southern California
10.
In the 1950s, Southern California invented the architectural style known as Googie, defined by a space-age look. A product of car culture, the style was embraced by motels, coffee houses, and gas stations as a way to grab motorists’ attention. Today, amid an encroaching grayscape, Googie buildings have become an endangered species. Each demolition, wrote the New York Times, seems “to symbolize the loss of something greater — a time when public spaces were fun and wacky, and when something as humble as a fast-food restaurant was designed to stun.”
11.
When actress Blake Lively went public with accusations that her “It Ends With Us” co-star Justin Baldoni orchestrated a smear campaign against her, she included a trove of texts between Baldoni and two publicists in her legal filing. “All of this will be most importantly untraceable,” one of the publicists, Melissa Nathan, said in one text. Lively’s procurement of such damaging messages has stunned entertainment litigators. “I’ve never seen a case like this,” said Neville Johnson. “The biggest battle we face these days is obtaining evidence from the other side.” L.A. Times
- Bryan Freedman, Baldoni’s lawyer, said he is planning to file a countersuit against Lively: “It is going to shock everyone who has been manipulated into believing a demonstrably false narrative.” Daily Mail | Deadline
In case you missed it
12.
A quick catch-up on headlines you may have missed from the past week:
- Officials in Santa Cruz said the city’s century-old wharf may never be rebuilt after enormous swells caused the end of the structure to collapse into the sea. They cited cost and the frequency of powerful storms. S.F. Chronicle | L.A. Times
- The parents of an OpenAI whistleblower who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment said they don’t believe it was a suicide, rejecting the medical examiner’s ruling. They are demanding an investigation. Mercury News
- Nearly two years after a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy beat a school teacher because he flipped him off, the deputy agreed to plead guilty to a felony. Multiple other deputies were relieved of duty for obstruction. L.A. Times
- The Oakland Diocese hid $106 million in an inactive nonprofit before declaring bankruptcy to avoid payouts to victims of clergy sexual abuse, a Dec. 11 legal filing alleged. The diocese said the charge is “not supported by the facts.” Catholic News Agency | NBC Bay Area
- An appeals court overturned the 2020 rape conviction of former 49ers star Dana Stubblefield after finding that prosecutors used “racially discriminatory language.” Stubblefield’s lawyer called the case “the most unfair trial I’ve ever seen.” S.F. Chronicle | KRON | A.P.
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