Category Archives: California

Vaquita porpoise could survive … but only if illegal fishing stops immediately

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DNA study finds rarest cetacean, only found in Gulf of California, has enough genetic diversity to recover – if gillnet ban is enforced


Scientists studying the DNA of the world’s smallest cetacean and rarest marine mammal, the vaquita porpoise, have made a surprising and bittersweet discovery.

With a tiny population of fewer than 10 individuals left, the mammal was assumed by conservationists to be at a similar risk of harmful mutations and inbreeding as other species with small gene pools.

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Democrats in states across US seek to offer legal refuge to trans youth

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Effort by state legislators follows California’s lead in responding to wave of Republican laws targeting transgender kids and families

Democratic lawmakers in more than a dozen states are following California’s lead in seeking to offer legal refuge to displaced transgender youth and their families.

The coordinated effort, which was announced on Tuesday by the LGBTQ Victory Institute and other advocates, comes in response to recent actions taken in conservative states. In Texas, for example, Gregg Abbott, the governor, has directed state agencies to consider placing trans children in foster care, though a judge has temporarily blocked such investigations. And multiple states have approved measures prohibiting gender-affirming healthcare treatments for trans youth.

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California tech titan’s Senate run has one target: Tesla’s self-driving software

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Dan O’Dowd has bankrolled his own campaign to take a swing at what he calls Elon Musk’s ‘amazingly terrible’ technology

Dan O’Dowd is hardly the first California tech titan to bankroll his own campaign for high political office. What makes him unusual is that he has no interest in winning the US Senate seat he is vying for, or even in challenging the other candidates competing in the 7 June primary.

O’Dowd, a software entrepreneur with a 40-year history of working on military, aerospace and other commercial contracts, is running, rather, out of frustration at his fellow tech entrepreneur, Elon Musk, whom he accuses of endangering road safety with a driver assistance software package he’s put in his Tesla electric cars.

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Los Angeles mortuary owner left bodies to rot in ‘sad and shocking’ case

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Mark B Allen faces 22 counts of misdemeanor for mistreating remains of 11 people, including infants

A Los Angeles funeral home owner illegally left the remains of 11 people, including infants, in stages of decay and mummification and faces more than a decade in jail, prosecutors said Friday.

Authorities opened an investigation into the Mark B Allen Mortuary and Cremations Services Inc., after receiving complaints from families. The mortuary, owned by Mark B Allen, is now closed and phone numbers listed for the business were disconnected.

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Parched southern California takes unprecedented step of restricting outdoor watering

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The resolution will limit watering to just one day a week, affecting millions in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties

Southern California officials declared a water shortage emergency Tuesday, and adopted new unprecedented restrictions on outdoor watering that will impact millions of people living in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties.

Metropolitan water district of southern California’s resolution will limit outdoor watering to just one day per week for district residents supplied by a stressed system of canals, pipelines, reservoirs and hydroelectric power plants called the State Water Project, which supplies water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of farmland.

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California police detain three in baby kidnapping as grandma unloaded car

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Police say baby Brandon Cuellar, who has since been found, was taken from home at about 1pm on Monday

A 3-month-old baby who was kidnapped from his San Francisco Bay Area home was found Tuesday and three suspects were detained, police said.

The baby, Brandon Cuellar, was taken to a hospital as a precaution, the San Jose police department announced on Twitter, without saying where the boy was located.

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Woman rescued after surviving in a forest for six days on yogurt and snow

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Sheena Gullett was stranded in a broken down car after it became stuck in the snow in California and her friend went for help

A woman stranded for six days in a broken-down car in a remote northern California forest survived by rationing yogurt and eating snow, authorities said.

The ordeal of Sheena Gullett, 52, was detailed in a Facebook post by the Lassen county sheriff’s office. Gullett and friend Justin Lonich, 48, were driving to Little Valley, a small incorporated community, on dirt roads off Highway 44 on 14 April when their vehicle became stuck in snow. They spent the night in the vehicle and in the morning its battery was dead.

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Beat it: trucker convoy driven out after being egged by kids in California

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The people’s convoy had gathered outside lawmaker Buffy Wicks’s house to protest her support of an abortion rights bill

A convoy of trucks that had gathered outside a California lawmaker’s house over the weekend to protest her support of an abortion rights bill was forced to leave the area after crossing paths with a group of young people armed with eggs.

The people’s convoy, inspired by Canadian truckers who shut down roads to protest vaccine mandates, arrived in the Bay Area last week after weeks of demonstrations in Washington DC.

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California family discovers five bears hibernating in crawlspace under home

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Bear League describes how family in Lake Tahoe heard ‘odd snoring-like noises’ but dismissed them before eventual discovery

A California family spent the winter dismissing odd noises that sounded a little like snoring, only to discover that five bears had spent the cold season hibernating under their house.

The Bear League group, which works to preserve bear habitat and help bears in distress largely around the Lake Tahoe basin region in the state, recounted the family’s astonishing episode last week.

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‘Democracy will wither’: Barack Obama outlines perils of unregulated big tech in sweeping speech

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In a keynote address at Stanford University, the former president made his most extensive remarks yet about the tech landscape

Technology companies must be reined in to address the “weakening of democratic institutions around the world”, Barack Obama said Thursday, in a sweeping keynote speech on the perils of disinformation.

Speaking at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, the former president made his most extensive remarks yet about the technology landscape, which he said is “turbo-charging some of humanity’s worst impulses”.

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Sherri Papini pleads guilty to kidnapping hoax that led to massive search

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The California native pleads guilty to scheme that triggered three-week search before she resurfaced on Thanksgiving day in 2016

Sherri Papini, the California woman whose disappearance made national headlines and sparked a massive search before she reappeared on Thanksgiving day in 2016, pleaded guilty on Monday to faking her own kidnapping and lying to the FBI.

The 39-year-old from Redding, in the state’s far north, did not offer any explanation for the elaborate hoax or why she claimed two “Hispanic women” had kidnapped her at gunpoint and chained her to a pole for three weeks while depriving her of food, beating and branding her.

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Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay $302m over pelvic mesh implant ads

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California court rules that company made misleading and potentially harmful statements in hundreds of thousands of ads

A California appeals court has upheld a lower court ruling that Johnson & Johnson must pay penalties to the state for deceptively marketing pelvic mesh implants for women.

Johnson & Johnson had appealed in 2020 after superior court judge Eddie Sturgeon assessed the $344m in penalties against the US pharmaceutical company’s subsidiary, Ethicon.

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GSK to buy US cancer drug developer amid pressure from activist investor

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GlaxoSmithKline’s £1.5bn Sierra Oncology deal comes after pressure from Elliott to boost its pipeline

The UK drug company GlaxoSmithKline has agreed a £1.5bn deal to buy a US cancer treatment developer, Sierra Oncology, as it tries to fend off pressure from the activist shareholder Elliott Management.

The deal will give Britain’s second-largest pharmaceutical company access to California-based Sierra Oncology’s momelotinib, a drug being tested on anaemic patients with a type of bone marrow cancer called myelofibrosis. GSK said the drug had “significant growth potential” and it expected sales to start next year, with one analyst predicting it could generate peak annual sales of about $1.7bn (£1.3bn).

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California jogger Sherri Papini admits faking her kidnapping in plea deal

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Papini will plead guilty to lying to authorities and mail fraud over 2016 incident that led to three-week search

Sherri Papini, the northern California woman charged last month with faking her kidnapping in 2016, accepted a plea bargain with prosecutors on Tuesday and acknowledged she had made up the story that prompted a frantic search and international headlines.

Her defense attorney William Portanova said his client would plead guilty to charges of lying to a federal officer and mail fraud.

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California university sues YouTubers who allegedly filmed disruptive pranks

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A judge also granted a restraining order to the pair accused of terrorizing students who ‘provoked extreme fear and anxiety’

A pair of YouTubers are facing a lawsuit and a restraining order after allegedly filming themselves disrupting classes at the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles and uploading footage of the staged pranks online.

The University of Southern California sued Ernest Kanevsky and Yuguo Bai over the incidents, USC Annenberg Media reported last week. A judge granted a restraining order banning Kanevsky and Bai, who are not USC students, from campus after university attorneys said the pranks had terrorized “students to the point where they are running out of lecture halls for fear of their lives”.

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Family sues LA Angels after stray baseball fractured boy’s skull

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Bryson Galaz was six years old when ball hit his head, causing brain damage, during warmup at Angel Stadium in Anaheim

The family of a boy who suffered a fractured skull and brain damage after being hit with a baseball during the warmup for a Los Angeles Angels game has sued the Angels, claiming negligence on the team’s part.

In 2019, Bryson Galaz, who was then six years old, was walking with his father in the first row of Angel Stadium, where players were mingling with fans more than an hour and half prior to the game, the lawsuit said. Bryson was struck on the side of his head when Keynan Middleton, an Angels pitcher who was warming up on the field, threw a ball at a teammate who missed the catch.

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Suspect in shooting of Lady Gaga’s dog walker mistakenly released from jail

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James Jackson, 19, one of the three suspects accused in connection with shooting of Ryan Fischer, who was walking artist’s bulldogs

The 19-year-old man arrested over the shooting of Lady Gaga’s dog-walker last year was released from jail in California earlier this week – by mistake, the authorities have said.

James Jackson, 19, Jaylin White, 19, and Lafayette Whaley, 27, were charged after the incident last February, accused of attempted murder, second-degree robbery and conspiracy to commit robbery in connection with the shooting of Ryan Fischer, who was walking the music artist’s French bulldogs.

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Police determine at least five people fired shots in Sacramento shooting

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Three people have been arrested since the early Sunday violence unfolded but the motive is still unknown

Police have said at least five people fired weapons in a weekend shooting in Sacramento, California, that killed six people and injured a dozen others and prompted calls for lawmakers to address the scourge of gun violence in the US.

Officials said on Wednesday that while the motive was still unknown, investigators think “ gang violence is at the center of this tragedy” and that “gangs and gang violence are inseparable from the events that drove these shootings”.

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Sacramento: second suspect arrested over mass shooting that killed six

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Smiley Martin, 27, brother of first suspect Dandrae Martin, facing gun-related charges but neither brother charged with homicide

Police in Sacramento arrested a second person in connection with Sunday’s mass shooting in a bustling stretch of California’s capitol. Six people were killed in the shooting and at least 12 were injured.

On Tuesday the department announced Smiley Martin, who was also injured in the shooting, would be booked in Sacramento’s county jail once his medical care is complete. Martin, 27, is facing charges of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person and possession of a machine gun. His brother Dandrae Martin, 26, was arrested on Monday and charged with assault and illegal firearm possession offenses.

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Suspect arrested in Sacramento shooting that left six dead

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Police say they have received more than 100 videos or photos from the scene and have executed three search warrants

Police in the California state capital have made an arrest in connection with Sunday’s mass shooting that left six people dead and at least a dozen others injured. In the hours after the bloodshed, police say they have received more than 100 videos or photos from the scene and executed search warrants on three homes.

They identified a 26-year-old man as one of the individuals arrested in connection to the shooting, in a press release. He has been charged with assault and illegal firearm possession offenses.

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