By Laura Blasey and Elvia Limon
Hello and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. He is Saturday November 12.
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Here’s a look at the top stories from the past week
Rep. Karen Bass is ahead of the businessman Rick Caruso. Bass overtook Caruso in the up and down battle to become mayor of Los Angeles, with Friday’s tally showing the veteran lawmaker 4,384 votes ahead of the property developer in a contest that won’t be settled until next week at the earliest. New totals from county election officials put Bass in the lead, by a margin of 50.38% to 49.62%, for the first time since Caruso took a slight advantage in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
More election coverage
- The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office is investigating Sheriff Alex Villanueva after soliciting campaign donations from deputies.
- California’s ballot metrics slate this fall attracted more than $700 million in total contributions.
- To draw attention to his unconventional Los Angeles City Comptroller campaign, Kenneth Mejia dressed up as Pikachu. Just over a year later, Mejia — a little-known certified public accountant — won the victory over City Councilman Paul Koretz.
- San Bernardino voters have overwhelmingly voted in favor of Helen Tran, who is set to become the city’s first Asian-American mayor.
- Governor Gavin Newsom’s two recent picks for the California Supreme Court made history this week, winning key confirmation and voter endorsement to become the first openly lesbian High Court justice and first Latina leader.
- Long Beach voters are on track to usher in two historic firsts for the region: sending the first LGBTQ immigrant to Congress and electing the city’s first black mayor.
The election is over, but the allegations of fraud are not. In rural Northern California – where Trump beat President Biden by 33 percentage points – local election officials and poll workers have felt threatened and beleaguered as a group of election deniers push conspiracy theories with no end in sight. The split is not so much between red and blue, but rather between mainstream conservatives and the far right.
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Helping Victims of Discrimination in Los Angeles The City of Los Angeles Department of Civil + Human Rights and Equity has launched a unit to investigate complaints of discrimination by employers, landlords and businesses. Officials said the unit will help Angelenos avoid large backlogs they may encounter at higher levels of government.
Will California remove rooftop solar incentives? A Public Utilities Commission proposal would reduce payments to homes and businesses that use solar power for the clean electricity they supply to the power grid. The cuts aren’t as deep as a previous plan that faced heavy criticism, but the plan could still have dramatic ripple effects.
A $2 billion winning ticket surfaces in Altadena. A lucky winner purchased the nation’s only matching Powerball ticket worth more than $2 billion at an Altadena gas station, becoming California’s first lottery billionaire on Tuesday. It was also a victory for Joseph Chahayed, the Syrian immigrant who owned the station and received his own prize for selling the ticket under California lottery rules.
A savage Southern California police chase for the ages. The chase through Los Angeles and Orange counties on Wednesday night was among the most dramatic in years. For about an hour, a suspect led police on a dangerous chase, twice driving into other people’s vehicles, hitting several cars and ramming at least two police cruisers. And everything was broadcast live on local television.
Buena Park peasants vote to unionize. They can play knights and royalty, but some performers in the Medieval Times castle theater say they are subjected to long hours and sometimes dangerous tasks for low pay. They voted 27 to 18 on Thursday to unionize, becoming the second castle in the chain to do so and joining a wave of organizing efforts across the country.
Berkeley could say goodbye to right turns at red lights. The city council voted last week to approve an initial proposal that would ban the practice, putting up signs at every intersection with a traffic light in the small town notifying drivers of the rule. The board still has to vote to approve the funding in its next annual budget.
A new nature preserve in Ventura County. Trust for Public Land said it bought the 1,250 acres of land just northwest of the Ventura county line for about $25 million. The plan is to transfer the land to the adjacent Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
Goodbye, Hyperloop. Elon Musk’s proposed Hyperloop transportation technology promised to propel passengers through tunnels in self-contained electric pods levitating at more than 600 mph, slashing a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco to 35 minutes. But after being inactive for several years, the Jack Northrop Avenue tube in Hawthorne – which has prompted complaints about road and pedestrian access, as well as questions about its purpose – has been removed, at the request of the town.
Pick up your employees’ laundry to bring them back to the office. At L’Oreal’s lavish new West Coast headquarters in El Segundo, workers are pampered by a concierge who will fill their car with gas, pick up their laundry, pick up their dog from daycare or perform any other task the workers desire. employees. The soft setup reflects a carrot-and-stick approach being used to get people back to the office as pandemic concerns wane among employers.
Singer Aaron Carter has been found dead. Carter, who rose to fame with catchy pop songs in the late 1990s and later battled drug addiction, was found dead at his Lancaster home on November 5. Authorities said they are investigating the circumstances surrounding his death.
ICYMI, here are this week’s good reads
The future of mushrooms is just south of downtown LA As consumers become more interested in mushrooms, they are moving beyond the white button mushrooms on grocery store shelves. In a 34,000 square foot building, on the same street as ready-mix concrete producer and Dr Pepper distributor, Smallhold is helping to change the market. The company’s Los Angeles urban farm grows mushrooms of fantastic presentation and scale – several thousand pounds of mushrooms a week, or tens of thousands of pounds in the near future, if all goes according to plan. .
Artistic swimming is no joke. The sport – which was once known as synchronized swimming until officials changed its name several years ago – has been dismissed as the Olympic version of an Esther Williams film from the 1940s and 1950s. But it’s just as athletic as gymnastics with the added challenge of being overwhelmed.
The therapist will see you now – hiking or on a surfboard. In Southern California, Surf Sister Sessions, a surf therapy program run by Groundswell Community Project, is just one of many therapy programs that now combine talk therapy with physical activities to help people to deal with. Across the country, you can find everything from dog-walking therapy to horticultural therapy to improv therapy.
Also… we are launching a new newsletter. Los Angeles has so much to explore, from dazzling dive bars to art house cinemas to an explosive array of art galleries. But how do you navigate this sprawling world if you don’t even know where to start? We understood. That’s why every Wednesday, we bring you LA Goes Out, where we round up the LA Times staff’s top recommendations for exploring and experiencing our city. Register here.
Today’s newsletter was curated by Laura Blasey and Elvia Limón. Please let us know what we can do to make this newsletter more useful to you. Send your comments, complaints and ideas to [email protected].
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