Good morning. It’s Friday, Feb. 23.
- Poll shows San Francisco Mayor London Breed trailing rival.
- Google A.I. tool puts Black people in Nazi-era uniforms.
- And Nvidia adds record $277 billion in stock market value.
Statewide
1.
California’s occupational safety agency, Cal-OSHA, is so severely understaffed that many cases of workplace injury are simply ignored, a journalism investigation found. California law requires the agency to look into every workplace accident that results in severe injury or death. Yet it employs just two investigators for the entire state. Jack Stein, a lawyer for a paralyzed pipefitter whose case was overlooked by Cal-OSHA, said without the threat of prosecution, companies take dangerous shortcuts with impunity: “You can’t just ruin a man’s life and walk away.” Sacramento Bee
2.
In California, where cycles of drought and flood are the norm, our latest water year has now entered an unusual stage: average. On Thursday, the Northern Sierra 8-Station Index, a snapshot of both snowpack and rainfall, was 96% of normal for the date. “It’s exceedingly rare that we ever really hit average in California,” said Andrew Schwartz of the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab. It’s nice for once, he added, to have sufficient snowpack while not having to worry “that roofs collapse and businesses shut down.” KQED
3.
On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman interviews Sarah Swanbeck and Erin Heys, academics at the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. They talked about how the issues of the day — including threats to nature, equality, and democracy — are weighing disproportionately on millennials and Gen Z. “I think, rightfully so, young people are very fatalistic, and potentially that could present itself as anger at the situation they find themselves in,” Swanbeck said.
Northern California
4.
Two boys where killed at a camping area along the Sacramento River just downstream from Shasta Dam when a hillside collapsed early Thursday, according to the authorities and a family friend. Tim Mapes, a Shasta County Sheriff spokesman, said details remained scarce and that an investigation was ongoing. “These are absolutely the most horrific types of events” that responders encounter, he said. The slide occurred days after the region was pummeled by heavy rains. Action News Now | KRCR
5.
San Francisco prosecutors are weighing possible sanctions against a public defender over her conduct while representing a man who beat his girlfriend so badly he was convicted of torture. Deputy Public Defender Ilona Yanez accused the victim of having a “Fatal Attraction” obsession with her abuser, sobbed so hard during court proceedings that she could barely speak, and bought drinks for jurors in an apparent bid for leniency in sentencing, according to an investigative report by ABC7.
- Hear Yanez struggling to hold back tears in court. 👉 ABC7/YouTube
6.
A poll showed San Francisco Mayor London Breed trailing a tough-on-crime rival eight months out from election day. In a ranked-choice voting contest, the largest share of respondents, 20%, said their No. 1 choice would be Mark Farrell, a former mayor and county supervisor. For Breed, the figure was 18%, within the poll’s margin of error. Jonathan Brown, who led the survey, said the result was an ominous sign for the incumbent: “It certainly looks like Breed is in very, very serious trouble.” S.F. Chronicle
7.
Google suspended its Gemini AI image generator after the tool created historically white-dominated scenes with racially diverse characters. For the prompt “a portrait of a Founding Father of America,” Gemini portrayed a Native American man in a traditional headdress. In other cases, German soldiers and Vikings appeared as people of color. After a backlash on social media, in which critics accused Google of racial bias, the company vowed to fix what it called “inaccuracies in some historical” depictions. N.Y. Times | A.P.
8.
Nvidia added $277 billion in stock market value on Thursday, Wall Street’s largest one-day gain ever, in the latest sign that insatiable demand for artificial intelligence chips won’t abate anytime soon. The gain amounts to more than the total market values of Bank of America ($265 billion) and Coca-Cola ($263 billion). At the close of trading, the Santa Clara company was valued at $1.96 trillion, making it the U.S. stock market’s third-most valuable company behind Microsoft and Apple. Wall Street Journal | Reuters
Southern California
9.
An audacious plan to build a 1.2-mile gondola that would ferry baseball fans from Union Station to Dodger Stadium cleared a major hurdle Thursday as the L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority approved its environmental impact report. Some residents of Chinatown, whose skyline would be invaded by the gondola, are vigorously fighting the project. To pacify critics, officials set a list of conditions intended to provide community benefits. Among them: Chinatown residents will get to ride free. L.A. Times | LAist
10.
A question posed to the Los Angeles group on the social media site Reddit sparked some amusing commentary this week: “What’s one thing that shows if someone is NOT from LA?”
- “If they can’t pronounce Sepulveda”
- “Thinks rush hour is still 5-7pm”
- “They refer to distance in miles, rather than in minutes or hours.” Reddit
11.
Photographer and artist Andrew Soria layered pictures of Los Angeles to create pop surrealist collages of various neighborhoods. Each work contains hundreds of digitally manipulated photos — showing skyscrapers, signage, street vendors, and other elements — selected to evoke the spirit and diversity of each community, such as Boyle Heights, shown above. Collater.al
- Explore more of Soria’s “Welcome to the Neighborhood” project. 👉 AndrewSoria.com
In case you missed it
12.
Five highlights from the past week:
- In 2021, California became the first state to require ethnic studies in high school. After protracted debate, the state’s curriculum included the story of Jewish Americans. But scholars are pushing a competing vision called “liberated ethnic studies” that largely excludes Jews — and some school districts are embracing it. N.Y. Times
- Scammers used artificial intelligence to write an obituary for Los Angeles journalist Deborah Vankin as part of an elaborate hoax. She avoided reading it, telling herself she was busy. When she finally did, she felt a wave of profound grief. L.A. Times
- “During the pandemic, scores of Silicon Valley investors and executives … decamped to sunnier American cities, criticizing San Francisco’s government as dysfunctional and the city’s relatively high cost of living,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “Four years later, that bet hasn’t really worked out.”
- Heavy rains have pushed the level of Whiskeytown Lake in Shasta County above its bellmouth spillway, a spiraling drain that is at once mesmerizing and terrifying. The Bureau of Reclamation shared video. @ReclamationCGB
- In 2003, a ranger invited the North Fork Mono Tribe to perform burns in a Sierra meadow that was overrun by pines after decades of fire suppression. “Freed from thirsty conifers, the meager spring began gushing through the summer. Within a few years, [tribal leader Ron] Goode says, these five verdant acres were once again worthy of the label ‘meadow,'” bioGraphic wrote.
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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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