Good morning. It’s Thursday, April 17.
- California mounts largest legal challenge to tariffs.
- Nvidia caught in battle between Washington and Beijing.
- And a major survey of Ruth Asawa’s fanciful art.
Statewide
1.
Gov. Gavin Newsom sued to halt President Trump’s tariffs on Wednesday, calling them “one of the most self-destructive things that we’ve experienced in modern American history.” The lawsuit argues that a 1977 law invoked by Trump does not allow a president to “tax all goods entering the United States on a whim.” Newsom has been restrained in criticizing Trump on other issues. But the likely presidential aspirant showed glimpses of the Democratic fury he’s known for on Wednesday. “This is recklessness at another level. … No rationale, no plan, no conscience to what it’s doing to real people,” he said. N.Y. Times | L.A. Times
2.
On Monday, Newsom unveiled a tourism campaign aimed at convincing Canadians angered by President Trump’s provocations to keep vacationing in California. The state, he noted, is “2,000 miles from Washington and a world away in mindset.” “Canada, come experience our California Love,” he said. A day later, Ravi Kahlon, a British Columbian lawmaker coordinating the province’s anti-America boycott, responded to the invitation: Not happening. “Our message to British Columbians, to Canadians, is hold the line. It’s working,” he said. Global News | CTV News
3.
The Atlantic reported on the coming deportation wave:
“Republican lawmakers are now preparing to lavish ICE with a colossal funding increase — enough to pay for the kind of social and demographic transformation of the United States that immigration hard-liners have long fantasized about achieving. … The reconciliation bill in the Senate would provide $175 billion over the next decade. A House version proposes $90 billion. To put those sums in perspective, the entire annual budget of ICE is about $9 billion.”
4.
A couple weeks ago, California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas announced that all but a few Democratic assemblymembers would leave X, citing “rampant hate speech” on the social media platform. But a significant number of the lawmakers just can’t seem to quit. Nearly a dozen Assembly Democrats have continued posting to X since Rivas elucidated the caucus’s moral stand. Politico wrote about “the X-odus that wasn’t.”
Northern California
5.
An Archdiocese of San Francisco panel tasked with reviewing child sexual abuse claims has returned more than half of accused clergy to their ministerial duties over the past decade, church documents showed on Wednesday. The internal decision-making of the church had long been shrouded in secrecy until a bankruptcy judge ordered the disclosure against the wishes of the archdiocese. “Reading these documents, you see darkness and evil,” said Margie O’Driscoll, 64, who has alleged she was abused. “Over and over again, you see the archdiocese protecting priests more than the children.” S.F. Chronicle
6.
Valero Energy Corp. said on Wednesday that it would permanently close or restructure its Bay Area refinery by 2026 as it faces growing regulatory and cost pressures. Valero, headquartered in Texas, has had a strained relationship with California officials. Last year, regulators fined it $82 million for releasing cancer-causing gases into Benicia’s air for 16 years. In 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom lashed out at Valero for booking huge profits amid soaring gas prices, accusing the company of “ripping Californians off.” Republican leaders attributed the potential closure to Democratic overregulation. KQED | Reuters
7.
Nvidia appears to be taking the brunt of the battle between Washington and Beijing for technological supremacy. As the Trump administration moved this week to restrict Nvidia’s sale of artificial intelligence chips to China, leaders inside the Santa Clara chipmaker felt “blindsided” by the clampdown, the Financial Times reported. Nvidia said it would take an immediate $5.5 billion hit. But the real pain is expected to come over the long term as the company’s sales potentially evaporate in a market considered vital to its future, analysts said. Wall Street Journal | N.Y. Times
8.
A new book, “Lost at Sea,” gives a sensitive portrait of Sausalito’s fading community of anchor-outs, people living on boats illegally anchored on Richardson Bay. Typical residents are eccentric, articulate, and elderly. Some ended up at sea by choice; others by way of despair. One woman made $76,000 the year before she lost her job and house. Another is working three jobs. “Many of them are poetic souls, lovingly captured philosophizing over high-gravity beers on the shore or making paintings on driftwood,” the New Republic wrote in a book review.
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9.
Ruth Asawa’s wire sculptures were long dismissed as women’s craft work. She grew up on a dusty farm in Southern California and learned to draw in an incarceration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II before getting attention in the national press for her abstract creations. The reports, however, presented her as a “domestic” artist — a homemaker who makes sculptures. The first major posthumous survey of Asawa’s work, which opened April 5 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the latest effort since her death in 2013 to give the artist her proper due. KQED | Mission Local
Southern California
10.
At 12:55 a.m. on Jan. 8, a sheriff’s official reported a fire a few doors down from the home of a woman who would later die on the west side of Altadena.
At 2:33 a.m., a police officer told dispatchers that flames had swept onto a street where a man would die in his driveway.
Minutes later, a sheriff’s official reported flames on the street where another man would die in his home.
Yet the first evacuation order for west Altadena didn’t come until 3:25 a.m., after dispatchers had received at least 14 reports of fire in the area, a review of 911 logs found. All but one of the 18 Eaton fire deaths occurred in the area. L.A. Times | KNX News
11.
When federal agents showed up at two Los Angeles elementary schools last week looking for kids they believed to be in the country illegally, it elicited an angry response from the district superintendent, Alberto Carvalho. He too was once undocumented. Carvalho grew up poor in Portugal. After high school, he moved to the U.S., overstayed his visa, and worked at restaurants, farms and construction sites. For a time, he was homeless. “Imagine: You’re poor. You don’t have a place to go, and you think that someone is always looking for you,” he said. N.Y. Times
12.
Keith Richardson made the leap from Southern California to southern Italy for his retirement. He decided on the picturesque town of Nardò, where he found the house of his dreams for $111,000 in a neighborhood surrounded by churches and lavishly decorated palazzos. “I’ve fallen in love with the Italian lifestyle and domani (tomorrow) attitude,” he said. “No need to worry because there is always domani. No worries, it will be taken care of domani, so for now, let’s just have a coffee and watch the people promenade by.” CNN
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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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