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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...

Rishi Sharma is hoping local veterans will help him with his mission to interview combat veterans of World War II. The 18-year-old Aguora Hills resident has completed more than 100 interviews and is shifting his attention to the Inland Empire. The recent high school graduate has decided to defer his college education so that he can conduct daily interviews. “When I first started, I was an armchair historian about WWII. I knew more than the average person, but delving into this, there’s an amazing amount of raw information,” he said. “After each interview, the picture becomes slightly more clearer of what they faced.” Through his nonprofit, Heroes of the Second World War, Sharma is conductin...

SACRAMENTO >> With a midnight deadline looming, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature’s top Democrats on Wednesday struck a deal to spend nearly $1 billion in fees collected from the state’s biggest polluters on programs to boost public transit and put more electric cars on the road by giving huge vehicle rebates to poor people. The spending blueprint was one of dozens of items lawmakers approved and sent to Brown on their last day of work for the year. They also endorsed measures that would expand unpaid family leave for some small business workers, require developers to install water meters in all new apartments and declare denim the official state fabric. Several other bills — inclu...

Thirty years ago today was a Sunday, the heart of the Labor Day weekend, and just as two planes were about to collide a mile and a half above the young city of Cerritos, things in the suburban town were quiet, as you’d expect. That’s how many people described the day up until 11:56 a.m.: quiet. If anyone had any plans for the day, they weren’t ambitious. Some residents were in church, some were shopping for groceries for backyard barbecues. Then-Plaing Commissioner George Ray, who today is the mayor of Cerritos, was doing some work at home on his dining room table. Ray, an executive for a Santa Fe Springs-based manufacturing firm that makes parts for airplanes and the space program, heard wh...

ONTARIO >> The once-vacant and quiet Meredith property between Vineyard and Archibald avenues began bustling with commercial activity Monday as officials dedicated QVC’s first West Coast distribution center with an opening ceremony. The 1-million-square-foot QVC warehouse was filled with a sea of empty shelving racks Monday, but trucks bringing inventory had arrived and officials expected to begin shipping product out from Ontario this week. They expect to ramp up the operation by the holiday shopping season. The new facility should shrink delivery times up to four days, Jim Reid, vice president of customer logistics, said. “We want to speed that process up for our West Coast customer...

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...

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...

Organizers behind the inaugural Music Tastes Good festival pledged that they will try to solve potential problems relating to parking and business owners’ abilities to serve their customers while the event takes place over the course of three late September days in the East Village area of Long Beach. “No one is going to be blocked out of their home or business,” event organizer Josh Fischel said Thursday moing, during the first of two plaed meetings between festival plaers and conceed members of the public. Materials handed out during the meeting reported that Music Tastes Good plaers will foot the parking bills for anyone who loses access to a paid parking space while street closures are ...

More than a year after the Califoia Coastal Commission halted the demolition of three waterfalls at Trump National Golf Club, the club was given a go-ahead this week by commission staff to move forward with restoration work. The initial infraction stemmed from demolition work at three man-made waterfalls at Trump National. The club had received a building permit from the city of Rancho Palos Verdes in April 2015, but didn’t get approval from the Coastal Commission for construction work inside the coastal zone. Parts of the course are home to protected bird species, including the Califoia gnatcatcher, which nests exclusively in the coastal sage scrub along a limited range of the Califoia coa...

RIO DE JANEIRO >> Inteational Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach chose a curious way over the weekend to try to spin the Rio Olympic Games as a success. “I think this is a really iconic games,” Bach said. “It is also games in the middle of reality. They were not organized in a bubble. They were organized in a city where there are social problems, social divides, where real life continued, and I think it was very good for everybody.” If Bach had only actually ventured into that reality. The first Olympic Games held in South America ended Sunday the same way they began 17u2009days earlier: with Bach in a state of denial. Bach, the IOC and Riou20092016 organizers promised these woul...

It was another golden summer for Long Beach and neighboring communities, as the Press-Telegram area’s athletes tued out an impressive haul of Olympic medals and memories. In all, the unofficial Team Long Beach delegation are coming back home with three gold medals and a bronze. Two of the gold medalists belong to a squad that could unofficially be called Long Beach’s own, the USA women’s water polo team. Much of the roster lives in the city, and many are well-known around town. That would include Rachel Fattal, a Seal Beach native who played for Los Alamitos High, and Courtney Mathewson, who coached at Long Beach City College for two years. Both eaed gold medals with a dominant 12-5 win over...

RIO DE JANEIRO >> Matthew Centrowitz, gold medal around his neck, was still trying to find his bearings at the dizzying height of the top step on the Olympic Stadium medal podium Saturday night when he was approached by Lord Sebastian Coe. Coe, the president of the track and field’s global goveing body and two-time Olympic 1,500-meter champion, was presenting gifts to the medalists as part of the medal ceremony. As the pair shook hands, Coe smiled and leaned close to Centrowitz. “Welcome to the club,” Coe said. Centrowitz, Maryland-bo, Oregon-bred, became the first American to join global distance ruing’s most exclusive club in more than a century, wiing the Olympic 1,500 final with a...

NEW YORK >> American swimmer Ryan Lochte said he over-exaggerated what happened at a Rio de Janeiro gas station and acknowledged it was his “immature behavior” that got him and three teammates into a mess that consumed the final days of the Olympics. Lochte, in a portion of an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer that aired Saturday, continued backtracking from a story that he initially described as an armed robbery. Police have said the swimmers vandalized a bathroom after a night of partying and armed guards confronted them and asked them to pay for the damage. “It’s how you want to make it look like,” Lochte said. “Whether you call it a robbery or whether you call it extortion or us jus...

Kathy Creighton was 16 when she landed what was her first summer job: squeezing oranges and working the cash register at the Orange Julius in San Pedro’s bustling Ports O’ Call Village. “We had these very ugly brown and yellow, itchy polyester uniforms we had to wear,” Creighton said. “We went home sticky and stinky.” But there were perks. The popular juice-and-burger spot was situated in a building constructed over the water, with wall-size windows on three sides. And the tourist helicopter pad was right next door. “We used to trade hamburgers for (free) helicopter rides,” she said. And, no, the boss never knew. The year was 1980. And Creighton, who moved out of state when her husband got ...

RIO DE JANEIRO >> In the shadow of mighty Usain Bolt, Allyson Felix achieved something unprecedented in women’s track and field Friday by wiing her fifth Olympic gold medal. And together with the rest of the 4x100-meter relay team, she brought the United States closer to its biggest medal haul in decades. The tally could have been higher, too, had the U.S. men’s 4x100 team not been disqualified after finishing third in the subsequent final. The women’s team was smooth, despite the rocky path to the final. Ruing the second leg in the relay, Felix kept the U.S. up there with the mighty Jamaicans, before English Gardner and Tori Bowie brought the baton, tightly clenched in their hands, ho...

Authorities filed charges against a 57-year-old man accused of striking a teen over the head with a metal pole while he was playing Pokemon Go in Long Beach, the Los Angeles County District Attoey’s Office said Friday. Jayson Louis Lingen has been charged with one count of assault with a deadly weapon. He is scheduled to be arraigned at the George Deukmejian Courthouse in Long Beach today, a district attoey press release said. According to prosecutors, the 17-year-old was playing the augmented reality game Wednesday night, near the Aquarium of the Pacific, when Lingen began yelling at the boy before attacking him with a metal pole. Authorities were contacted and police took the suspect into...

RIO DE JANEIRO >> It was as close as a two-goal game in the third quarter Wednesday. But, eventually and somewhat inevitably, the U.S. women’s water polo team worked its way into position to go for a gold medal. “As you could tell, that was a battle today,” attacker Courtney Mathewson said. “I think my skin is like magenta colored.” The Americans wore down Hungary for a 14-10 victory and now will face Italy in the Olympic finale Friday. Maggie Steffens scored a team-high four goals for the U.S. Maddie Musselman added a pair. “I can’t help but smile,” Musselman said. “It’s just so enjoyable. We have two more days, one more game with this group of girls. It’s emotional because I love th...

LAS VEGAS — Nate Diaz and Conor McGregor really don’t like each other. Or apparently press conferences for that matter. Just five months after their press conference for UFC 196 broke into a wild melee, the pair and their camps hurled insults, profanities and drinks at each other Wednesday at the UFC 202 press conference at the David Copperfield Theatre at the MGM Grand. Diaz and McGregor are the main event Saturday in a welterweight rematch of their scintillating March showdown, shockingly won by Diaz via a second-round rear-naked choke. McGregor arrived nearly 25 minutes late to the presser Tuesday, which also featured UFC President Dana White and light heavyweights Anthony Johnson and Gl...

SAN FRANCISCO >> Knock, knock, Google’s video chatting app has arrived. The app, dubbed Duo, represents Google’s response to other popular video calling options, including Apple’s FaceTime, Microsoft’s Skype and Facebook’s Messenger app. Duo isn’t much different from the other video chatting services, except that it gives a glimpse at who is making the call, helping the recipient decide whether to answer. Google calls this feature, “Knock, knock.” The new app, aounced in ...

RIO DE JANEIRO >> A hush fell over Olympic Stadium as the eight finalists in the Olympic Games 100-meter final took their marks Sunday night, the only noise coming from helicopters hovering above. The tension, however, was deafening. It was as if the whole stadium, the whole Rio Games, was collectively holding its breath in anticipation of a moment the world had been waiting months for, maybe longer. The starter’s pistol was finally fired unleashing a roar that echoed past the stadium’s aging walls through Rio and beyond, and tens of thousands of flashes, all of it chasing Jamaica’s Usain Bolt down the blue track deeper into history. Bolt, ruing his last 100 final at a major champions...