Good morning. It’s Thursday, Dec. 8.
- San Jose becomes largest city to end parking minimums.
- San Diego punter won’t be charged in alleged rape.
- And the cosmic beauty of the Mojave’s Trona Pinnacles.
Statewide
1.
With the UC strike now in its fourth week and no end in sight, faculty across the system planned to withhold tens of thousands of grades in solidarity with academic workers. That could hurt undergraduates whose financial aid depends on their grades. “For someone like me, who lives off campus, withheld aid could literally mean losing my housing,” said Allie Jones, a UC Santa Barbara senior. EdSource
2.
All but one of the winning bids to develop floating wind farms on five ocean tracts off California came from Europe, where offshore wind is well developed. The winning companies, including a joint venture, hail from Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, Portugal, and Chicago. All told, they will pay $757 million, considerably less than the $4.37 billion pledged in a February auction on the East Coast, where turbines can be bolted down in shallower waters. CalMatters | A.P.
3.
Few places offer a more powerful reminder of our place in the cosmos than the Mojave Desert. Pictured above is a sunrise at the Trona Pinnacles, a collection of more than 500 tufa spires that rise as high as 140 feet. They’re located on Bureau of Land Management property, which means you can drive up and camp right in the middle of them, no fee required. BLM | The Dyrt
Nine of the best California desert winter campgrounds. 👉 KCET
Northern California
4.
Ramesh Balwani, the former chief operating officer of Theranos, was sentenced Wednesday to 13 years in prison for his role in the company’s blood-testing fraud scheme. The term is slightly longer than the one given to Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder and Balwani’s former romantic partner. Judge Edward Davila said Balwani’s financial statements “weren’t just projections, they were lies.” Balwani declined to speak before his sentencing; At her trial, Holmes issued a tearful apology. Wall Street Journal | Bloomberg
5.
San Jose this week became the largest U.S. municipality to abolish parking minimums, a decades-old policy that housing advocates blame for thwarting residential density. Now gone are rules that required two covered parking spots for each single-family home and roughly 600 spaces for a typical Target. Parking reform has been sweeping the nation as local leaders seek solutions to the twin crises of housing affordability and climate change. Mercury News
6.
Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review, offered a defense of “killer robots”:
“It’s always easy to say someone else should put themselves in harm’s way. There will come a day when insisting the police don’t deploy robots will seem like insisting every mission to neutralize a terrorist be flown by a manned airplane instead of a drone.” Politico Magazine
Southern California
7.
The San Diego County district attorney’s office said Thursday that the former San Diego State football punter Matt Araiza would not be charged in the reported 2021 rape of a 17-year-old girl at a house party. The accusation against Araiza rocked the university campus and derailed his NFL career. The DA’s office said it reviewed 35 witness interviews, DNA analyses, and evidence derived from 10 searches that included video “of the incident itself.” “Ultimately, prosecutors determined it is clear the evidence does not support the filing of criminal charges and there is no path to a potential criminal conviction.” S.D. Union-Tribune | A.P.
8.
Some rowers at UC San Diego thrived on the intensity of their coach, Geoff Bond. For others, he was a nightmare. Bond had an unpredictable temper and regularly threatened to harm or kill team members, they said. Two years ago, rower Brian Lilly Jr. confided in a friend about his struggles rowing for Bond. A few days later, Lilly killed himself. His parents are now suing Bond and the school for wrongful death. A.P.
9.
The exposure of Harvey Weinstein as a predator in 2017 emboldened victims of sexual violence to speak out about their experiences and, in some cases, to seek justice. So Weinstein’s trial in Los Angeles is unavoidably symbolic, Dana Goodyear writes, “a referendum on the abuse of power, the nuances of consent, and the credibility of women, five years after a supposed collective shift in consciousness.” New Yorker
10.
If public health officials in Los Angeles bring back mandatory masking, they may discover a less receptive public than during previous coronavirus waves. The New York Times reports:
“Covid updates do not elicit the unease they once did — in part because cases and hospitalizations during the current outbreak are nowhere near where they were during the worst stretches. But also because the subject has grown tiresome, residents said.”
11.
P-99 had four kittens, all females. The National Park Service announced Tuesday that the tracked cougar delivered the litter last July in the western Santa Monica Mountains. Los Angeles is one of just two metropolises to host wild mountain lions (the other is Mumbai). But researchers have warned they could face extinction from threats such as traffic, rat poison, and inbreeding. Conservationists hope a planned wildlife crossing will save lives. A.P.
12.
In 1964, Esquire sent the New York photographer Bruce Davidson to document the burgeoning city of Los Angeles. According to the East Coast intelligentsia, he wrote, L.A. was a “cultural desert with acrid air, bumper-to-bumper traffic, tall palms, and seedy Hollywood types.” For unknown reasons, the magazine declined to run Davidson’s pictures, which sat in a cupboard for 50 years before being published in the book “Los Angeles 1964.” See a selection here. 👉 The Cut | Vogue
See more in the Rose Gallery collection.
Correction
An item in an earlier version of this newsletter about the photography of Bruce Davidson misattributed a characterization of Los Angeles as a “cultural desert with acrid air, bumper-to-bumper freeways, tall palms, and sordid Hollywood types.” That was Davidson’s description of a view held by the East Coast intelligentsia, not his own perspective.
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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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