Zorro
Zorro's JournalFrom a Tommy's security job to a ride home on Metro, her last hours alive
The train pulled into the North Hollywood station Monday at 4:45 a.m., and I boarded with a handful of other riders headed south.
This was the same line a security guard had taken on April 22 after getting off work at a Tommy’s burger joint.
It was the last trip of her life, before she became the victim of an unprovoked stabbing on this train.
Her slaying, so senseless, random and unsettling, wrecked her family and shook the city. I can’t explain exactly why I felt the need to retrace her steps. Maybe it was simply an attempt to know her a little better.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-05-01/column-from-a-tommys-security-job-to-a-ride-home-on-metro-her-last-hours-alive
DeSantis says 'take your fake meat elsewhere' and signs bill banning lab-grown meat
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to "save our beef."
At a press conference in Wauchula, Florida, DeSantis signed a bill that would outlaw the manufacture and distribution of lab-grown meat in the state, a "threat" to Florida's agriculture, he said.
"Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere. We're not doing that in the state of Florida," DeSantis said before he signed SB 1084, which he touts as the first-in-the-nation law to protect farmers and the "integrity of American agriculture."
DeSantis made fun of liberal elites who advocate for "fake meat" as a way to combat climate change.
"They will say that you can't drive an internal combustion engine vehicle. They'll say that agriculture is bad. Meanwhile, they're flying to Davos in their private jets," DeSantis said.
https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/politics/2024/05/01/gov-ron-desantis-signs-lab-grown-meat-ban-in-florida/73525706007/
Such a petty little asshole...
California's population increased last year for first time since 2020
California’s population rose last year for the first time since 2020, according to new state data.
The state’s population increased by 0.17% — or more than 67,000 people — between Jan. 1, 2023, and Jan. 1, 2024, when California was home to 39,128,162 people, according to new population estimates released Tuesday by the California Department of Finance.
“The brief period of California’s population decline is over,” H.D. Palmer, a department spokesman, said in a phone interview. “We’re back, and we’re returning to a rate of steady, stable growth.”
That resumption of growth, Palmer said, was driven by a number of factors: Deaths, which rose during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, have fallen nearly to pre-pandemic levels. Restrictive foreign immigration policies imposed during the Trump administration have been loosened under President Biden. Domestic migration patterns between states also have changed, boosting the state’s population.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-30/californias-population-increased-last-year-for-first-time-since-2020
The longest, strangest trip: Some psychedelic drug users are stuck with unwelcome highs
A.J. took two small hits off a cannabis vape pen, a common ritual with his morning coffee. Moments after exhaling, a transfigured, kaleidoscopic version of the world emerged before his eyes.
“Some colors are seeping into the other colors,” the 30-year-old said, gesturing across his art-filled living room in Yorba Linda. “In that Persian tapestry on the wall, the flowers are flowing like the wind, back and forth, and the centerpieces of the horses and other animals, they’re stagnant still but I can feel them kind of moving, almost like a gallop.”
A.J. — who requested anonymity to discuss his drug use and medical history — was on no other mind-altering substances beyond the caffeine in his mug. The fantastical visions, which he’s come to expect and in some ways even enjoy, were a lingering effect of past drug use. They’re a manifestation of a rare condition called hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, or HPPD, which has puzzled psychiatrists and researchers and raised alarms as psychedelic drugs have become more mainstream for both therapeutic and recreational use.
LSD and other hallucinogens have long been said to cause flashbacks for some heavy users, but HPPD is a unique phenomenon. It’s a lasting condition defined by a range of symptoms straight out of the “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-30/psychedelic-drug-highs-hallucinogen-persisting-perception-disorder-hppd
Regulator Investigates Ford's Hands-Free Driving System After Fatal Crashes
Source: Wall Street Journal
U.S. auto-safety regulators have launched an investigation into the safety of Ford Motor’s hands-free driving system, following a pair of recent crashes that left three people dead.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the auto industry’s top regulator, said in a filing made public Monday that it had received notice of two recent incidents involving BlueCruise, Ford’s driver-assistance system.
In both cases, Ford Mustang Mach-E SUVs collided with stationary vehicles on highways during nighttime lighting conditions, each resulting in a fatality, NHTSA said.
NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation confirmed that BlueCruise was engaged in each of the vehicles in question immediately before the collisions, according to an initial review by the agency.
Read more: https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/nhtsa-receives-notice-of-two-incidents-involving-fords-driver-assistance-system-510fc6e9?st=rfb1l10vzwi8uyq&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi's India
The White House went to extraordinary lengths last year to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a state visit meant to bolster ties with an ascendant power and potential partner against China.
Tables on the South Lawn were decorated with lotus blooms, the symbol of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. A chef was flown in from California to preside over a vegetarian menu. President Biden extolled the shared values of a relationship “built on mutual trust, candor and respect.”
But even as the Indian leader was basking in U.S. adulation on June 22, an officer in India’s intelligence service was relaying final instructions to a hired hit team to kill one of Modi’s most vocal critics in the United States.
The assassination is a “priority now,” wrote Vikram Yadav, an officer in India’s spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, according to current and former U.S. and Indian security officials.
https://wapo.st/3w3RrgT
THE NEW FACE OF FLOODING
John Corideo drove the solitary two-lane highways of southern Alabama, eyeing the roadside ditches. It had been raining off and on for days and Corideo, chief of the Fowl River Fire District, knew that if it continued, his department could be outmatched by floodwaters.
It kept raining. Water filled the ditches and climbed over roads, swallowing parts of a main highway. About 10 residents who needed to be rescued were brought back to the station in firetrucks. More remained stranded in floodwaters, out of the department’s reach. “That week … we just caught hell,” Corideo said.
What the residents and rescuers of the Fowl River region faced on that day was part of a dangerous phenomenon reshaping the southern United States: Rapidly rising seas are combining with storms to generate epic floods, threatening lives, property and livelihoods.
In the Fowl River’s case, unusually high tides slowed floodwaters as they went downstream to drain. This increased the water’s depth and flooded a wide expanse — even several miles upstream. The result was deluged roads, washed out cars and damaged houses from a flood that was larger, deeper and longer-lasting due to rising seas.
https://wapo.st/44iCuEi
'It Is Desolate': China's Glut of Unused Car Factories
On the outskirts of Chongqing, western China’s largest city, sits a huge symbol of the country’s glut of car factories. It’s a complex of gray buildings, nearly a square mile in size. The thousands of employees who used to work there have moved on. Its crimson loading docks are closed.
The facility, a former assembly plant and engine factory, had been a joint venture of a Chinese company and Hyundai, the South Korean giant. The complex opened in 2017 with robots and other equipment to make gasoline-powered cars. Hyundai sold the campus late last year for a fraction of the $1.1 billion it took to build and equip it. Unmown grass at the site has already grown knee high.
“It was all highly automated, but now, it is desolate,” said Zhou Zhehui, 24, who works for a rival Chinese automaker, Chang’an, and whose apartment looks down on the former Hyundai complex.
China has more than 100 factories with the capacity to build close to 40 million internal combustion engine cars a year. That is roughly twice as many as people in China want to buy, and sales of these cars are dropping fast as electric vehicles become more popular.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/china-auto-factories-price-cuts.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nE0.2Z8U.ANLMDLpY-3kH&smid=url-share
'So appalled': What witnesses told special counsel about Trump's handling of classified info while still president
In the summer of 2019, only hours after an Iranian rocket accidentally exploded at one of Iran's own launch sites, senior U.S. officials met with then-president Donald Trump and shared a sharply detailed, highly classified image of the blast's catastrophic aftermath.
The image was captured by a U.S. satellite whose true capabilities were a tightly guarded secret. But Trump wanted to share it with the world -- he thought it was especially "sexy" because it was marked classified, one of his former advisers later recalled to special counsel Jack Smith's investigators, according to sources familiar with the former adviser's statements.
Worried that the image becoming public could hurt national security efforts, intelligence officials urged Trump to hold off until more knowledgeable experts were able to weigh in, the sources said. But less than an hour later, while at least one of those intelligence officials was in another building scrambling to get more information, Trump posted the image to Twitter.
"It was so upsetting, and people were really angry," one of Trump's former advisers told investigators, sources said.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/appalled-witnesses-told-special-counsel-205822504.html
How the Enquirer Betrayed a Mafia Don and the Donald
The first person to testify in the first-ever criminal trial of an American president is the former publisher of the National Enquirer. But the supermarket tabloid might not have been around to “catch and kill” stories about Trump’s sexual liaisons if it were not for the early financial support of another notorious New York celebrity, the gangster Frank Costello.
And while Trump is not known for his grasp of history, he’d do well to view Costello’s relationship with the Enquirer’s first publisher as a cautionary tale.
In the 1940s, Frank Costello was known as the Prime Minister of the Underworld owing to his gentlemanly public manner, political connections, and patina of respectability. Costello used the mob’s Prohibition-era millions—and the money from its vast illegal gambling empire—to take control of Tammany Hall. This meant that while Costello was the head of what came to be known as the Genovese crime family, he also pretty much ran the Democratic party in New York.
In 1942, when Costello’s godson, Gene Pope, wanted to buy the Enquirer—then called the Inquirer, Pope needed cash. Being a good godfather, Costello—depending on which source you believe—forked over somewhere in the range of $10,000 to $25,000. Costello also regularly fronted Pope the cash needed to keep the doors open at the struggling publication. And I do mean cash, because each week, a messenger from the tabloid came to Costello’s de facto headquarters, the Waldorf Hotel barbershop, where Costello handed over an envelope of greenbacks.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-enquirer-betrayed-a-mafia-don-and-the-donald
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