press-news

The sound of applause has scarcely died down in the Capitol after last week’s vote to significantly expand Califoia’s requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Proponents who steered the groundbreaking legislation are still basking in the afterglow of an effort that—after seeming on the brink of defeat—deftly mustered unexpected support and reaffirmed the state’s inteational leadership on climate change. But such is the unsentimentality of politics: Someone has to pop the pretty balloons and sweep up the confetti. For all that was achieved by the passage of SB 32—extending the original 2006 law and setting a new target of reducing statewide emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels b...

STINSON BEACH >> The sleek, flapping salmon that fishermen hauled aboard the rolling Salty Lady charter boat near the Golden Gate Bridge were the survivors of the survivors. After five years of drought, the native Chinook salmon that the men were reeling in this past week were there only because state and federal agencies have stepped in to do much of the salmon-raising that Califoia’s overtapped rivers once did. Most of the fish were bo at the agencies’ hatcheries and carried in trucks for release downstream. As the men watched and waited for one of their fishing poles to dip sharply, Victor Gonella, president of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, remembered his childhood in the 195...

DEKLE BEACH, Fla. >> Tropical Storm Hermine was intensifying Saturday as it moved slowly up the Atlantic Coast with heavy rains, wind and storm surges making a mess of the holiday. Hermine (her-MEEN) already caused 2 deaths, damaged homes and businesses and left hundreds of thousands without electricity from Florida to Virginia. “This is not a beach weekend for anyone in the Mid-Atlantic to the northeast,” said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. At 2 p.m. Saturday, Hermine was centered 90 miles east of Duck, North Carolina, with top sustained winds of 70 mph (110 kph), moving east at 10 mph (17 kph). Tropical Storm Waings were in effect as fa...

Thousands of Califoia’s foster care kids may be overdrugged with psychotropic medications, often without medical follow-up or a legally required approval from a judge or parent, according to a stinging report by the Califoia State Auditor. “The state and counties have failed to adequately oversee the prescribing of these medications,” wrote auditor Elaine M. Howle. The long-awaited report, released in August by State Auditor Elaine Howle, mirrors many findings of Bay Area News Group’s investigative series “Drugging Our Kids.” Those stories, which appeared in Southe Califoia News Group publications, including this one, highlighted how only 10 percent of the state’s 1,280 highest prescribers w...

A group of students at Rim of the World High School in Lake Arrowhead have created a stir for displaying Confederate flags, staked into the beds of their pickup trucks, in the school parking lot. On Friday, two Ford pickups, parked side-by-side, sat parked in the school parking lot, one Confederate flag and one American flag displayed in the bed of each truck. The black pickup also sported stickers from Patriot Alliance, an online retailer of clothing, National Rifle Association, and Donald Trump campaign signs. Also on Friday, Ruing Springs resident Jeifer Celise-Reyes, whose daughter began her freshman year at the high school last month, said she sent emails to school board president Cind...

The “Beach Pantry,” stocked with caed beans, soups, grape juice and other goods, is a new resource at Cal State Long Beach for students who find themselves unable to cover the combined costs of study and meals. The pantry has been open since the Aug. 22 begiing of the campus’ fall term. Cal State Long Beach’s student govement, with help from a Lakewood charity called Food Finders, created the stash of nonperishable foods for students enduring short- or long-term difficulties. Food insecurity is actually a fairly widespread problem on Cal State University campuses; university officials reported in February that some 23 percent of students within the Cal State system experience food insecurity...

TARZANA >> Los Angeles police responded to Chris Brown’s residence in Tarzana Tuesday and later served a search warrant on the home as the singer took to social media to deny any wrongdoing and to condemn police. At a news conference Tuesday afteoon, LAPD Lt. Chris Ramirez said police were serving a search warrant on the home, and an unknown number of people were exiting the residence. The house is located in a posh, hillside neighborhood of one-and two-story homes that are nearly all protected by locked iron gates. A call initially came at 3:11 a.m. from the 5000 block of Corbin Avenue, police said earlier. “It came out as a female requesting help,” Officer Drake Madison of LAPD’s Me...

A man in his 40s was shot to death early Tuesday moing in Long Beach’s Zaferia neighborhood, according to authorities. Officers responded to the 1600 block of Hile Avenue around 4:45 a.m. when they got a call about a shooting that had just happened and ended with someone lying in the street, police said. When they arrived, officers found a man with a gunshot wound to the upper torso, Long Beach police spokesman Sgt. Brad Johnson said. The man was unresponsive, according to police. A Long Beach Fire Department crew determined the man was dead, Johnson said. Police said the shooting is still under investigation, and it’s unclear at this point if it was gang-related. No arrests have been made....

An estimated 75,000 students will retu to classes in Long Beach Unified today, and police are urging motorists and pedestrians to be safe out on the road. Drivers, police say: Yield the right of way to pedestrians in crosswalks, do not pass cars that are stopped for pedestrians, obey speed limits, stop for school buses with red lights flashing and don’t drive distracted. Pedestrians: Yield to vehicles if you are outside the crosswalk, and do not cross between intersections controlled by traffic signals. And finally, parents: Do not double park in front of school, follow school drop-off procedures, and teach your child to always cross the street at a crosswalk. It is equally important for pe...

LOS ANGELES >> Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein visited the Black Lives Matter encampment outside Los Angeles City Hall today where she said she agreed with the group’s demand that Mayor Eric Garcetti fire police Chief Charlie Beck. Stein pointed to the firing of police chiefs in other cities and said she came to Los Angeles City Hall today to “support the community that’s demanding justice by asking the police chief to step down.” “We need him to be replaced by someone who doesn’t simply dismiss death after death as being within police policy and refusing to even file charges,” Stein said. Beck in January did recommend that District Attoey Jackie Lacey file criminal char...

LONG BEACH (CNS) - One of two men charged in the shooting death of a 19- year-old man in Long Beach appeared in court Monday but did not enter a plea. Edgar Miguel Espinoza, 18, of Downey, was arrested in San Diego Thursday in coection with the killing of Nick Cubas. Cubas, also of Downey, was found dead about 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 4 in the area of Willow Street and the San Gabriel River, according to the Long Beach Police Department, which has not released additional details. Espinoza appeared in a Long Beach courtroom Monday where a judge ordered him held without bail. His arraignment was postponed to Sept. 14. Espinoza and co-defendant Rueben Alexander Ortega, 19, of Lakewood, are both charg...

SAN FRANCISCO >> Califoia’s $64 billion high-speed rail plan lacks reliable funding sources and is in danger of ending up with only one line that doesn’t coect to San Francisco or Los Angeles, members of a Congressional panel said Monday during a hearing. Proceeds from a state environment program that is supposed to help fund the project were far below expectations and private funding for the train has yet to materialize, Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a Califoia Republican, said. “Where is the money going to come from,” LaMalfa asked Dan Richard, chairman of the rail authority’s board. Richard said private firms have expressed interest in the system but want to see the first leg up and ruing. Th...

School starts Wednesday in most of Long Beach and it’ll likely be a hot day. Unbearably hot? Depends what you can bear. While we type this, the forecast is for a high of 86 degrees. We can, theoretically, bear that, coming from hardy pioneer stock. But we won’t. We will wake up in our air-conditioned home, make a mad sprint to our air-conditioned car and drive to our air-conditioned office. Hours later, we will do the whole thing in reverse. We don’t live in an average temperature. It’s 72 degrees all the time in our little world. Meanwhile, more than half the students in Long Beach in the K-12 grades will be sitting in classrooms without air conditioning, not made any cooler by 25-30 sweat...

The concept of a “four-year university,” at least at Cal State University campuses, has long been something of a polite fiction for many students. The reality is, a majority of students still need at least six years of schooling to attain an undergraduate degree, and it’s something educators across the CSU system are being pressured to change. The CSU system has seen some improvement in graduation rates in recent years; during the 1980s and early 1990s, fewer than 10 percent of first-time freshman managed to graduate within four years. Just 19 percent of Cal State freshman who entered college in 2011 managed to ea a degree in four years, while 57 percent of those who started in 2009 graduate...

May 2014: The Teachers Association of Long Beach distributed surveys to its members to determine how many classrooms in Long Beach Unified experience stifling heat. TALB received 200 responses from teachers with mixed results. September 2014: The district asked schools to curtail physical activity and canceled all nonleague and league competition for two days. Additionally, Long Beach Unified communicated with parents about “hot weather precautions, including the need to stay hydrated.” Parents, meanwhile, attend a school board meeting, pleading with the district to do something about the lack of air conditioning in older buildings across the district, which they say creates an unhealthy lea...

In Long Beach, school isn’t cool. That’s generally speaking. It’s cool at about 40 percent of the 87 school buildings in the Long Beach Unified School District that are lucky, or mode, enough to have air-conditioned classrooms. It’s no sweat for students at, say, Chavez Elementary School, built in 2002, or Powell K-8 School, built in 2000, or Signal Hill’s Nelson Middle School built four years ago, or McBride High School, built in 2013. But when students retu to class Wednesday at schools built during the two biggest boom eras in Long Beach history — 27 schools were constructed in the two years following the 1933 Long Beach Earthquake, and 25 opened between 1950 and 1959 to serve the then-ne...

Long Beach’s Plaing Commission will decide Thursday whether to allow plans and permitting for the Belmont Beach and Aquatic Center to move forward. If all the approvals are granted, the $103 million project would move on to the City Council, then the state Coastal Commission. The center is designed to replace the Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool, which was to down after engineers determined the natatorium was in danger of collapse in the event of an earthquake. The proposed replacement, designed by architect Michael Rotondi, includes two Olympic-sized pools (one inside a structure, the other outside), an indoor diving well, a recreational pool and other amenities. If approved, a transparent oval ...

Between 1999 and 2013, Califoia’s Academic Performance Index boiled everything about the state’s K-12 public schools down to a single number between 200 and 1000. That’s going away in a new, more nuanced system that’s now under construction. In the old model, the desirability of neighborhoods or even whole communities in large part hinged on their API score. Careers were made or lost based on how far a school or district was from the magic 800 target number. And under the federal No Child Left Behind law, failure to steadily increase an API score — even an already high one — could mean dire trouble for a school or district. But the API was only based on the results of standardized tests tak...

As part of a wide-ranging bust focused on mail-related crimes in Southe Califoia, federal officials said Friday that they’d charged 33 people — including one from Long Beach and one from Lakewood — with committing crimes including stealing cellphones from a mail-processing center and hoarding almost 50,000 pieces of undelivered mail. The charges span 28 separate criminal cases, according to the U.S. Attoey’s Office in Los Angeles. Authorities have so far issued arrest warrants for six of the 33 defendants. Most of the suspects are U.S. Postal Service employees or contractors. About half are facing charges for mail theft or possession of stolen mail, but other cases include charges of conspi...

The “Great Food Truck Race” on Food Network has always been smitten with Southe Califoia competitors. This season is no different. The show, which debuts Sunday night, features the owners of Bigmista’s Barbecue & Sammich Shop and Bigmista’s Moing Wood, both in Long Beach. The barbecue restaurants are run by husband-and-wife team Neil and Phyllis Strawder, best known for their signature wood-smoked brisket. In the opening episode, the contestants are involved in a fuel-cake eating contest at a Los Angeles theme park. “I leaed a really big lesson, and that was – I never want a food truck. It is really hard work,” Neil Strawder said during a phone interview Tuesday. Strawder, a familiar fa...