Good morning. It’s Friday, June 2.
- California reservoirs inch toward full capacity.
- A new resistance movement blooms in Fresno.
- And powerful portraits of San Francisco’s homeless.
Statewide
1.
On Wednesday, Meta said it would pull news from its social media networks if California followed through on a proposal to make tech companies pay publishers for their content. On Thursday, the state Assembly defied the company, voting 46-6 to advance the bill. “To me, this is an empty threat,” Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks said of Meta’s stance. “These companies have made billions and billions and billions of dollars while our newsrooms are shutting down across the state of California.” Sacramento Bee | CapRadio
2.
☝️ New drought maps released this week showed California looking gloriously free of orange and red, the colors depicting severe drought or worse. As of Thursday, the size of the Sierra snowpack was 314% of the historical norm. As it melts in warmer weather, many of the state’s major reservoirs have inched up toward full capacity.
Here’s how the levels look now compared to a year ago. 👇
- New satellite imagery showed the remarkable revival of two desiccated lakes. 👉 Tulare Lake | Owens Lake
3.
Dispatches from the homelessness crisis:
- Mayor Sheng Thao said Thursday that Oakland may charge other cities a fee if their homeless residents move to Oakland. “I am very open about calling out the cities and saying, ‘You need to do more for your unhoused residents,'” she said. S.F. Examiner | S.F. Chronicle
- In a rare bright spot, Sonoma County reported a 22% drop in homelessness. Leaders attributed the decline in part to projects converting old motels and other sites into housing. Press Democrat | SF Standard
- Life-and-death struggles with fentanyl are now unfolding every day on Los Angeles County’s streets. Newly released numbers showed that the opioid was implicated in 58% of fatal overdoses among unhoused residents in 2021 — nearly triple the percentage in 2019. L.A. Times
- “I want my photos to feel like they are going to breathe on you.” The photographer Harry Williams captures moving portraits of people on the streets of San Francisco. 👉 Harrywphoto.com | SFGATE
4.
On this week’s California Sun Podcast, host Jeff Schechtman talks with Clare Frank, author of the new firefighter memoir “Burnt.” Frank began her firefighting journey at age 17 and rose to become California’s first and only female state chief of fire protection. She talked about embracing the danger of the job: “You have to be willing to be reckless to excel in this job. … A little bit of a cavalier attitude, where you go, ‘Yea that’s gonna hurt or that’s gonna burn.”
Northern California
5.
“only stopping them cuz they black.”
Almost half of the sworn personnel in the Antioch Police Department, 44 of 99, were on text threads where officers called Black residents racial slurs, bragged about beating suspects, and joked about violating people’s civil rights. John Burris, a lawyer representing plaintiffs in a civil-rights lawsuit against the department, linked the scandal to demographic change. “This was a white working class town,” he said. “I think the police department was kind of taken aback by having all these African-Americans out there and they just started treating them poorly.” Wall Street Journal
6.
Mark Arax wrote about a new resistance movement in Fresno, where life expectancy drops 20 years in the span of 15 miles from the wealthy Northside to the “meth-fueled” hustle of the Southside:
“On the Southside, they’ve hollowed out a crater of neglect, and this is where neighborhoods of Latino, Black and Hmong residents live in some of the worst concentrated poverty in America. On the Northside, they’ve built new hospitals, new schools, new housing tracts and shopping centers to lure upwardly mobile Fresnans to a land where none of that suffering exists.” N.Y. Times Magazine
7.
Twitter’s head of trust and safety resigned Thursday after Elon Musk publicly rebuked his staff over a content moderation decision. Ella Irwin had replaced Yoel Roth, who left the platform soon after Musk’s chaotic takeover in October. In a tweet, Musk said employees erred in handling the posting of the controversial film “What is a Woman?,” which was found in violation of hate-speech rules purportedly over “misgendering.” “Whether or not you agree with using someone’s preferred pronouns, not doing so is at most rude and certainly breaks no laws,” Musk wrote. Wall Street Journal | Axios
Southern California
8.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said Thursday that it would not bring charges against actor Armie Hammer after he was accused of sexual assault. The office conducted an “extremely thorough review,” it said, but found insufficient evidence of a crime. A woman’s accusation that Hammer raped her in 2017 derailed his career, essentially blacklisting him from Hollywood. In a February interview with Air Mail, Hammer, 36, acknowledged that he was into B.D.S.M., but insisted everything was consensual. Hollywood Reporter | A.P.
9.
“It’s not about money, it’s about accountability.”
A former Playboy model who said Bill Cosby drugged and raped her in 1969 filed a lawsuit against the entertainer Thursday under a new California law that suspended the statute of limitations on sex abuse claims. Victoria Valentino, 80, said Cosby approached her at a Los Angeles cafe, where he saw her crying over the drowning death of her 6-year-old son. Later that evening, she said, Cosby gave her and a friend pills. “It will make you feel better,” she alleged he said. “It will make us ALL feel better.” A.P. | Washington Post
10.
In 2016, the USS Boxer dumped diesel fuel into the Pacific Ocean then unintentionally sucked it right back into the warship’s water supply, an investigative report revealed. Crew members said they suffered gastrointestinal problems, skin rashes, and burns. Years later, some say they are still sick. For years, the military declined to acknowledge the incident aboard the Boxer, whose home port is San Diego. They do now because reporters presented proof. Military.com
11.
“The whole country will soon be heavy off into rollerskates.”
Associated Press, June 29, 1978
In the summer of 1978, the Associated Press carried an item about a fad taking over California: Gliding along the pavement on shoes equipped with polyurethane wheels. Two years earlier, brothers Jeff and Mark Rosenberg had opened what they claimed was the first outdoor roller skate rental anywhere, Cheap Skates, operating out of a van in Venice Beach. “It is the new hula hoop,” Jeff Rosenberg said. Soon the boardwalk was swarmed by rollerskaters — shaggy-haired, shirtless, and carefree. Mark Rosenberg posted a great series of photos. 👉 Flickr
In case you missed it
12.
Five items that got big views over the past week:
- The Sea Ranch, a modernist utopia along the Sonoma coast, enjoys a sort of cult status among architects. After years of visiting, the architect David Ross and his partner found a place of their own, built in 1980, and set about restoring its original grandeur. Architectural Digest took a tour.
- In a beautifully written piece, Daniel Duane explored how Californians like his mother are struggling to accept that YIMBYs have now seized the moral high ground. While the old Berkeley where Duane grew up is never coming back, he wrote, “we all want to grow old among loved ones and familiar faces.” N.Y. Times Magazine
- Charles Phoenix amassed a vast archive of family slides found at thrift stores, flea markets, and estate sales. His volume “Southern Californialand” is a nostalgic tour of the region from Santa Barbara to San Diego between the 1940s and 1960s. Vintage Everyday
- When a South Lake Tahoe woman found a coyote and her newborn pups under her home, she let a local wildlife advocate set up a camera to document the new family. His videos have been a hit on social media. @tahoetoogee | CBS Sacramento
- Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez just paid about $61 million for a megamansion in Beverly Hills. It has 38,000 square feet of living space, 24 bathrooms, parking for 80, a whiskey lounge, and pickleball court. Wall Street Journal | Dirt
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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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