Good morning. It’s Thursday, Jan. 30.
- Students struggle to shake pandemic learning loss.
- Meta to pay President Trump $25 million settlement.
- And the looming end of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility.
Statewide
1.
California students performed significantly below their pre-pandemic scores in math and reading while also lagging behind national averages, according to 2024 national assessment scores released on Wednesday. The scores, however, masked widening disparities between higher and lower-performing students. Among California fourth graders, for example, scores at the 90th achievement percentile fell only 1 point between 2019 and 2024. For those in the 10th percentile, they fell 10 points. Gaps also widened between racial and socioeconomic groups. EdSource | Mercury News
- The 74: “There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Americans have been getting dumber.”
2.
When the Trump administration threatened to prosecute local officials over sanctuary policies last week, Democratic leaders unsurprisingly howled in defiance. But some Republicans in California’s agricultural heartland have also resisted Trump’s mass deportation talk. John Zanoni, the Fresno County sheriff, reaffirmed his commitment to sanctuary policies. And last week, Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer said the city’s officers would not help immigration agents. “Fresno will not sacrifice the trust we’ve worked so hard to build with our community,” he said. Marek Warszawski praised the leaders in a column for the Fresno Bee.
3.
“Very wet period incoming.”
Forecasters said on Wednesday that updated model data suggested northern and central California would be drenched by much more precipitation than earlier predicted. Back-to-back atmospheric rivers were poised to roll into the state beginning Friday and linger into next week, bringing accumulated totals of up to 6 inches of rain near the coast and up to 20 inches of snow in the high Sierra. Meteorologists said Southern California could expect rainfall next week between Tuesday and Thursday. S.F. Chronicle | L.A. Times
- See animation of the forecast. 👉 Scripps
4.
The California Historical Society, established in 1871, announced that it would permanently close after facing years of financial challenges exacerbated during the pandemic. Its rich holdings of nearly 600,000 items dating back a century before the Gold Rush will be handed over to Stanford. Tony Gonzalez, the organization’s board chair, said the transition was “bittersweet” but probably for the best. “We think of it as a rebirth,” he said. “Stanford will not be a state historical society, but the collection will be in better hands with them than it could be with us.” N.Y. Times
Northern California
5.
Meta agreed to pay President Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of unlawfully shutting down his accounts on Jan. 7, 2021, as he attempted to overturn his election loss. Mark Zuckerberg explained at the time that Trump’s posts appeared intended to “provoke further violence.” The Wall Street Journal cited sources that said Trump wanted the litigation resolved before Zuckerberg, who has cultivated a newfound alliance with the president, could be “brought into the tent.” Wall Street Journal
- The Atlantic: Trump’s settlements raise the question of “whether the litigants are seeking to purchase favor as they try to navigate the many regulatory threats from his new government.”
6.
OpenAI said it found evidence that the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the San Francisco company’s proprietary models to train its own language model, which upended the market this week. Security researchers with Microsoft, an OpenAI partner, observed individuals they believe may be linked to DeepSeek harvesting data using OpenAI’s application programming interface, sources told Bloomberg. Some tech writers could not resist noting the irony of OpenAI’s complaint given its reputation for pilfering other people’s work. Bloomberg | The Verge
7.
In 1996, California’s juvenile prison population peaked at 10,122 young people. The situation began to change in the 2000s after widely publicized reports of abuse in the state’s youth system. Arrests fell; lock-ups were shuttered. Today, there are fewer than 3,000 individuals in the system. The New York Times Magazine explored a provocative idea: Does reducing incarceration cut youth crime?
“One of the things that people don’t understand is how many young people who commit delinquent acts will simply grow out of that phase on their own,” said Alex Piquero, a criminologist. “They mature, their brains develop, and they learn to make better decisions.”
8.
California’s trees are the star of a new Broadway musical. “Redwood” was originally inspired by the story of Julia “Butterfly” Hill, who ascended a threatened old-growth redwood in December 1997 and didn’t touch the ground for another 738 days. Idina Menzel, known widely as the voice of Elsa in Disney’s “Frozen,” plays Jesse, a successful businesswoman who seeks escape in Humboldt County. Thousands of LED panels envelop the stage, offering panoramic forest vistas, the New York Times wrote.
- When a tree sitter captured the nation’s attention. California Sun (2017)
Correction
A summary in Wednesday’s newsletter misstated the name of Alameda County’s former district attorney. She is Pamela Price, not Pamela Paul.
Southern California
9.
Southern California Edison is asking state regulators for permission to make its customers cover more than $7 billion in damages that the utility paid out to victims of devastating wildfires in 2017 and 2018. Investigators found that Edison’s equipment ignited both of the conflagrations — the Thomas fire in 2017 and the Woolsey fire in 2018 — and committed multiple safety violations. April Maurath Sommer, the leader of an environmental group, noted that Edison would recover most of what it paid to victims of the Thomas fire “by raising electricity rates on those very victims themselves.” L.A. Times
10.
One day after the Los Angeles wildfires erupted, the idea for FireAid came to music mogul Irving Azoff. Less than 48 hours later, the benefit concert was announced. “I didn’t have to call anybody — the phone just rang,” Azoff said. The performers, taking the stage tonight at Kia Forum and the Intuit Dome, include Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Joni Mitchell, Lady Gaga, Stevie Wonder, Pink, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, and many others. It will be streamed pretty much everywhere. You can even catch it at AMC and Regal movie theaters. L.A. Times | Wall Street Journal
11.
Other wildfire developments:
- Moments before the Eaton fire erupted, high-voltage power lines faulted in the Altadena area, new sensor data revealed. The New York Times showed how the faults coincided with two flashes in the vicinity of transmission lines captured on surveillance video.
- Zeke Lunder, a veteran wildfire and fuels-management expert, used historic fire maps to show how parts of Malibu have burned nine times in 90 years. “Crazy,” he said of wanting to rebuild there. “It’s crazy.” YouTube (~2 mins)
12.
The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, pictured above, a glittering sea of mirrors in the Mojave Desert, may be doomed for good after PG&E announced this month that it would stop buying power from the facility. Ivanpah opened in 2014 as the world’s largest concentrated solar plant, which creates electricity by focusing sunlight onto three 459-foot “power towers.” But it never worked as well as expected. If PG&E’s decision is upheld, two of the towers will be shut down. The third is likely to close as well, reports say. “Sometimes, government makes a bad bet,” wrote climate columnist Sammy Roth. L.A. Times
Thanks for reading!
The California Sun is written by Mike McPhate, a former California correspondent for the New York Times.
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