The Brief

As President Joe Biden today bowed to the growing chorus of elected Democrats and Democratic voters calling for him to exit the 2024 race, everyone is taking another good hard look at Kamala Harris.

“Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala Harris to be the nominee of our party this year, ” Biden wrote in a social media post, calling his selection of Harris to be his vice president “the best decision I’ve made.”

Vice presidents rarely get much attention. What attention Harris has gotten on the job hasn’t been particularly positive. Counter to the reputation she cultivated early on in her career as a pragmatic politician and sharp-minded prosecutor, public opinion on Harris soured in the summer of 2021 and has mostly stayed sour.

That was in part thanks to the White House saddling her with a series of unenviable and intractable tasks. Beyond that her role, like that of most vice presidents, has been high on profile, but low on actual responsibility. It’s a job perhaps best described by fictional Veep Selina Meyer as the political equivalent of being “declawed, defanged, neutered, ball-gagged, and sealed in an abandoned coal mine.”

Nor was Harris faring much better with voters in her home state. Last year 59% of California voters in a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll said they would not welcome her on the top of the ticket.

But now that Harris is being considered as the most likely substitute for Biden, more voters seem to be warming to her. A fresh Washington Post poll found that the vast majority of Democratic voters nationwide would be “satisfied” with Harris at the top of the ticket. The same poll found her narrowly beating Trump in a head-to-head election among registered voters.

And so the nation is catching itself back up to speed on all things Harris — and that means catching up on a life of accomplishment and controversy here. More than any other vice president in generations, Kamala Harris’ biography is singularly Californian.

Born in Oakland, bussed to school in Berkeley, tested by San Francisco’s cutthroat municipal politics and propelled onto the national stage as the state’s top law enforcement officer and then its first female senator of color, Harris’ approach to politics and policymaking were honed here.

Now that voters are reconsidering whether Harris has what it takes to be president of the United States — and as Donald Trump and JD Vance train their oppo-machine upon her — we’re resurrecting this look at her California years and career. Here are nine ways that California shaped Kamala Harris, and that Harris shaped California.

A child of Berkeley

In a state full of transplants, Harris is a lifelong Californian.

She was was born in 1964 in Oakland — the hospital a little over a mile from the city hall where, more than half a century later, she would announce her short-lived 2020 bid for the presidency. Born to immigrant parents who met while getting their PhDs and protesting for civil rights at UC Berkeley, she spent her childhood in Berkeley. Harris’ father, Donald Harris, is from Jamaica and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, is from India. The couple split when Harris was 7, and Harris and her sister Maya were raised mostly by her mother, who died in 2009.

In the first Democratic presidential debate in 2019, Harris famously skewered Joe Biden — then her campaign rival — for his past opposition to federally mandated busing to desegregate public schools. For Harris, she said, the issue was “personal.”

Specifically, Harris rode the “red rooster” from Berkeley’s working-class flatlands to Thousand Oaks Elementary School at the base of the affluent north Berkeley hills. This was 1969, just one year after Berkeley Unified introduced its “two-way” busing program across its elementary schools. Berkeley being Berkeley, unlike local integration plans across the country, the city had undertaken this one on its own accord.

After the debate dust-up, Harris clarified that she does not support federally mandated busing, a policy stance not so dissimilar from the one she needled Biden over.

Traversing back and forth between different strata of society — black, white and Asian; well-off and working-class — is a familiar trope in Harris’ biography.

“It wasn’t a homogenous life,” said Debbie Mesloh, a friend who has also worked for Harris as a communication director and a consultant. “She’s a very resourceful person in that she can move in between these worlds.”

Vice President Kamala Harris graduated from Howard University in 1986. Her graduating year photo is in the bottom row, second from right.

Harris spent her teenage years in Montreal, moving there with her sister and mother when Gopalan accepted a university research position there. She earned a political science and economics degree at Howard University in Washington D.C. but returned to California to get her law degree in 1989 at the University of California, Hastings in San Francisco.

Until her most recent move to Washington, she called California home.

Fresh out of law school, she joined the Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1990, serving there eight years before crossing the bay to San Francisco. In 2003, she unexpectedly won election as San Francisco district attorney, where she served two terms before her narrow election as state attorney general in 2010. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.

The influence of king/queen-maker Willie Brown

Former state Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown has helped accelerate many a successful political career in California (including that of Gov. Gavin Newsom). Harris got a boost from Brown, too.

In March 1994, San Francisco Chronicle’s legendary columnist Herb Caen described the scene at Brown’s surprise 60th birthday party. Clint Eastwood was there, wrote Caen, and he “spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris.” Brown had a reputation for dating much younger women. In his column, Caen described Harris, then a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, as “something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl.”

The relationship ended after two years, but her connection to Brown, three decades her senior, did have an outsized effect on her career.

Willie Brown and Kamala Harris in 1994.

“I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie,” John Burton, who used to be president pro tem of the state Senate, former chair of the California Democratic Party and a San Francisco political powerhouse in his own right, told Politico.

The speaker gave Harris a couple plum positions on two state regulatory boards — the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission. “If you were asked to be on a board that regulated medical care, would you say no?” Harris told SFWeekly a few years later.

Harris’ connection to Brown also helped her make connections across San Francisco high-society and California political elite. In 1996, a year after Brown became mayor and Harris broke off the relationship, she joined the board of trustees at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

When Harris ran for San Francisco district attorney nearly a decade later, her first contribution came from Elaine McKeon, chair of the museum’s board. More — much more — poured in from donors with last names like Fisher, Getty, Buell, Haas and other noble houses of the Bay Area.

But from the beginning of her political career, Harris has seen her connection with Brown as a liability — a cudgel that opponents can use against her and, at worst, a tired, sexist trope used to question the legitimacy of her ascendant career. In the first run to be San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris deliberately hired a campaign consultant known for working with clients outside the Brown political machine. During that same campaign, she described her past relationship with the former speaker and mayor as “an albatross hanging around my neck.”

As for Brown, he recently told a reporter, regretfully, that he and Harris are no longer in touch.

A lack of clarity

You saw it in the presidential race. You’ve seen it in her as vice president. As the New York Times once put it: “the content of her message remains a work in progress.” We saw it before in California.

While running the California Department of Justice, Harris was often loath to wade into the political battles taking place just a few blocks away in the state Legislature.

There was the bill that would have required her office to investigate police shootings. She did not take a formal position (though she did tell a reporter it would be bad policy). The bill died.

There was the proposal to force police departments to gather data on the ethnicity and race of the civilians they stop. Harris also declined to take a position. It passed anyway.

And on the biggest criminal justice overhaul in California in a generation, Harris also kept mum.

Prompted by a judicial decree that the state had to dramatically cut the population of its overcrowded prison system, “realignment” was a package of state policies passed in 2011 that shifted tens of thousands of inmates out of state custody and into county jails or onto the rolls of local probation systems.

Despite in many ways reflecting the lessons described in her book “Smart on Crime,” which argued that non-violent criminals can be redirected into less punitive systems without jeopardizing public safety, Harris, the state’s top law enforcement officer, was silent on the policy.

That earned a rebuke from the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, which wrote in its endorsement of her 2016 Senate candidacy that Harris “has been too cautious and unwilling to stake out a position on controversial issues, even when her voice would have been valuable to the debate.”

What some critics call prevarication or flip-floppery, her supporters call pragmatism. Those are just two ways of describing the same quality, said Corey Cook, a political scientist and provost at St. Mary’s College, and a longtime observer of San Francisco politics.

“She’s not an ideologue,” he said, meaning rather than stake out the boldest, ideologically-coherent agenda, she tends to focus on individual fixes to specific problems. Hence the “3am agenda” of her presidential campaign, a collection of policy changes designed to address the problems that keep the average voter up at night.

“The idea that she would have consistent positions on issues informed by ideology isn’t who she is,” said Cook. Harris may appear to pick her battles, he said, because for her “the only lasting solutions are going to be the ones that are able to sustain a majority coalition of support.”

Making a mark: sex crimes, domestic violence, child abuse

Harris has never shied away from the “tough on crime” label when it comes to a certain class of criminals: domestic violence perpetrators, child abusers and sex traffickers.

After nearly a decade in Alameda County and a short stint as a deputy district attorney in San Francisco (she left, calling the leadership there “dysfunctional”), in 2000, Harris joined the San Francisco city attorney’s office under Louise Renne.

Renne said she was looking for someone to head the office’s Child and Family Service unit, which investigates child abuse cases. This was not considered a prestigious post. Prosecutors inside the unit had taken to calling it “kiddie law.”

Renne thought Harris, who had focused on child abuse and sexual exploitation cases in Alameda County, would be a good fit.

That instinct was confirmed on Harris’ first day on the job, Renne said, when a number of children who had been separated from their parents were formally adopted into new families.

“She comes into my office and says ‘Come on, Louise, we’ve got to go over to court. There are going to be adoptions today,’ and she had all these teddy bears,” Renne recalled. “She knew the occasion. She knew it was an important one and it should be celebrated.”

Harris’ focus on the victims of abuse and exploitation continued after she was elected as San Francisco’s District Attorney.

“I don’t know what the term ‘teenage prostitute’ means. I have never met a ‘teenage prostitute.’ I have met exploited kids,” Mesloh, then Harris’ communications director, recalls her boss saying at her first all-staff meeting. Harris then ordered her prosecutors not to use the term in court. A year later, Harris sponsored a bill putting the crime of human trafficking into the state criminal code.

Some Democrats say Harris’ prior life as a prosecutor with a focus on sex crimes would be a key advantage in a potential general election contest against Trump, who has been found liable in a civil case for sexual assault and recently became the first former president to be convicted of a felony. In that case, the 34 counts were related to the falsifying of business records in connection to an alleged sexual encounter with a pornographic film actress.

But using the full force of the law to penalize pimps, traffickers and other abusers has earned Harris some criticism from civil libertarians and from advocates for sex workers.

In one of her final acts as California’s attorney general, Harris had the CEO of Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, arrested on pimping charges. Backpage was an online classifieds site known for its “adult services” section, which prosecutors had long warned served as a marketplace for sex traffickers.

The arrest was based on a contentious legal argument that pit anti-trafficking fervor against the First Amendment. Since Backpage was merely a platform for ads, its lawyers argued, it was protected by the same law that protects Google from being held liable for illicit websites listed in its search results. A superior court judge agreed and threw out the case, though an amended charge, pursued by Harris’ successor, then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra, led Ferrer to plead guilty to money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution and to the shuttering of the site.

The Harris mantra: ‘Smart on Crime’

One of the reasons Harris became known as a rising-star District Attorney was her focus on prevention, which she explained in her book, Smart on Crime, written in 2009, the year before she ran for attorney general.

“Public health practitioners know that the most beneficial use of resources is to prevent an outbreak, not to treat it,” Harris wrote. “Instead of just reacting to a crime every time it is committed, we have to step back and figure out how to disrupt the routes of infection.”

Kamala Harris as San Francisco District Attorney on June 18, 2004.

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Marcio Jose Sanchez

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Harris’ “Back on Track” program, considered the most successful implementation of this idea, redirected first-time, non-violent drug offenders into supervised education, job training courses, therapy sessions and life skills classes. It was a modest program, but a novel one compared to what most other big city law enforcement officers were doing in 2005.

“In that time period, I think that she was a radical,” said Mesloh. The program has since been emulated by cities around the country. When Harris became attorney general, she launched a similar pilot program for Los Angeles County.

Harris’ focus on prevention produced some of her key accomplishments as district attorney. But in the context of the 2020 presidential primary, some of those same accomplishments struck many critics on the left as overly punitive.

The year after launching Back on Track, Harris introduced an anti-truancy initiative. Based on a statistical correlation that chronic class skippers are more likely to be both perpetrators and victims of homicide, Harris’ office began threatening the parents of persistently absent students with prosecution.

Harris has been quick to point out that the “stick” in this carrot and stick approach only came out after a series of escalating interventions, including mandatory meetings with school staff and social workers. No one went to jail under the program, though a handful of parents were fined. Within a few years, city truancy rates fell by a third and Harris took credit.

In 2010 her office sponsored a bill to take the program statewide. In the hands of other district attorneys, the statute was used in at least a handful of cases to put parents behind bars. Critics have said that the policy has been disproportionately wielded against poor parents of color.

In a 2019 interview, Harris said she regretted any “unintended consequences” of the state law.

Harris has (almost) always opposed capital punishment

Her opposition to the death penalty has been one of the most controversial stands in her career, but it’s also an example for those who criticize her lack of consistency.

On April 10, 2004, three months after her inauguration as San Francisco’s new district attorney, 29-year-old police officer Isaac Espinoza was gunned down by a 21-year-old with an AK-47. Three days later, Harris made good on a campaign promise and vowed not to seek the death penalty for the shooter. David Hill was later convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

The decision engendered a predictably fierce backlash from the police union and rebukes from politicians. “This is not only the definition of tragedy,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said at Espinoza’s funeral, “it’s the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law.” The assembled officers cheered while Harris remained seated.

Some of Harris’ critics say she has wavered in tougher political circumstances.

In 2014, when a federal court judge ruled that California’s administration of the death penalty was unconstitutional, Harris appealed the decision as state attorney general, arguing that it was “not supported by the law.”

Harris later said that she was obligated to defend capital punishment as the legal representative of the state. Many have pointed out that she was happy not to defend a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage that voters passed in Proposition 8 when it was challenged a year earlier. Harris’ response: She was merely reflecting the position of her client, Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration.

She also explained that the judge’s ruling, which held that the long delays between sentencing and execution in California amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment,” could be used to justify speeding up the state’s system of capital punishment.

Prosecutorial overreach controversies

Both as district attorney and as state attorney general, Harris led offices that criminal justice advocates say was overly aggressive in pursuing convictions and lacked transparency in a way that belies Harris’ brand as a “progressive prosecutor.”

In March 2010, just as Harris was campaigning to become California’s attorney general, San Francisco authorities shut down a police department crime lab in the city’s Hunters Point naval yard. A technician named Deborah Madden was accused of skimming drugs, raising broader questions about the lab’s ability to appropriately handle evidence in criminal cases. (Madden later pleaded guilty).

Harris immediately dismissed 20 drug cases, but the number eventually grew to over 1,500 after documents showed that prosecutors within Harris’ office had known about Madden’s potential unreliability months before the lab was closed, but had neglected to tell defense attorneys.

A superior court judge later excoriated Harris’ office, writing that the violations infringed on the defendants’ constitutional rights.

Afterward, Harris formed a unit to handle the sharing of evidence with criminal defense attorneys. She has also said that she did not know about the problems at the crime lab until after the scandal blew up.

But that hasn’t done much to assuage the concerns of critics who say Harris had a tendency toward prosecutorial overreach, which continued once Harris became the state’s attorney general.

Kamala Harris is sworn in as California’s attorney general on Jan. 6, 2011.

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Office of the Attorney General of California

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In 2015, for example, lawyers for an inmate convicted of murder attempted to have the case thrown out after new evidence suggested that Riverside County prosecutors lied on the stand during the initial trial. Harris’ office, representing the state prison system, resisted, only backing down after footage of one of her deputies being eviscerated by three federal judges went viral.

A spokesperson for her since-abandoned presidential campaign said Harris ordered her office to drop the challenge as soon as “she became aware” of the case.

Critics point to other examples. There was her office’s decision to defend a molestation conviction that local prosecutors had secured with a false confession.

Asked about that case, the spokesperson said that it was “long-standing practice” for prosecutors within the Californian Department of Justice to file legal motions without the express approval of the Attorney General, implying that, again, Harris was not aware that her office was making the argument. But in this case, the spokesperson added, state prosecutors believed “the original case…was valid and that the victim in the case deserved justice.”

Another example: her office’s refusal to take over a 2011 Seal Beach mass shooting case after a judge recused the entire Orange County District Attorney’s office for widespread prosecutorial misconduct. Harris defended her decision: “it was being handled at the local level.”

Such a track record is to be expected of any prosecutor, said Sally Lieber, who worked with Harris on human trafficking legislation while representing Mountain View in the state Assembly.

“It is an adversarial system and so she was filling a particular role, but I think that she was able to do it in a very sophisticated, smart and responsive way,” she said.

As California’s AG: Playing hardball

Harris’ biggest accomplishment while California’s attorney general was to secure a financial settlement with some of the country’s largest banks accused of illegally foreclosing on homeowners.

In September 2011, Harris pulled out of ongoing negotiations between attorneys general from nearly every US state and the five banks, calling the proposed deal of $2-to-$4 billion “crumbs on the table.”

Harris was not the first attorney general to walk away, but the departure of the country’s largest state seemed to have its intended effect.

A few months later, with California back in the mix, a new deal was struck. This time, California got $20.2 billion in debt reductions and direct financial assistance.

Still, some consumer groups and outside experts were critical of the deal, arguing that the banks would have been forced to write off much of that bad debt eventually. “All sizzle, no steak,” is how Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin put it.

But Harris’ willingness to play hardball did result in a bigger settlement, said Rob McKenna, former Washington attorney general who was part of the negotiations.

“It’s possible for states to overstate the impact they had on the final settlement. The former New York Attorney General (Eric Schneiderman) would sometimes make claims about the settlement and improvements he had obtained,” he said. “But it’s fair to say that Attorney General Harris negotiated and obtained some improvement in the settlement for California.”

Kamala the campaigner

Harris launched her 2020 presidential campaign high on fanfare and hype, only to flame out less than a year later before even making it to Iowa. It was a historically stark underperformance from a candidate that many Democratic insiders believed would be a formidable contender.

In California, Harris’ electoral track record has been mixed.

Her first spin on the campaign trail was a superlative success. In her 2003 race for San Francisco District Attorney, she pushed out a two-term incumbent and won more votes than any other candidate running for a city-wide office that year.

Harris’ first run for statewide office didn’t go quite smoothly. Her race for Attorney General against Republican Steve Cooley wasn’t called until weeks after Election Day. Yes, Harris won. But she did so by less than a percentage point.

Now, after 18 years in which not a single Republican has won statewide office in California, it’s easy to look back at that nail-biter of an election and see an early sign of Harris’ weakness as a candidate. But at the time, the calculus was a little different. Cooley, a relative moderate, was considered the favorite to win against Harris, a San Francisco liberal. This was 2010, which proved to be a historic landslide election for the GOP. The fact that Harris eked it out despite those headwinds, and as the first woman and person of color to hold that office no less, cemented her status as a rising star in the Democratic Party.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris talk as they assess the damage during the Creek Fire at Pine Ridge Elementary on Sept. 15, 2020, in Auberry.

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Gary Kazanjian

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Also rising was Gavin Newsom. The two were San Francisco friends and ran in the same social circles even before their political careers ignited. They share the same political consultants. And when the two most prestigious California elective offices opened up — for governor and U.S. senator — they sidestepped a ballot rivalry when she successfully ran for the Senate, as did he for governor.

Newsom has said — and recently reiterated — that he would not challenge Harris for the Democratic presidential nomination should Biden withdraw. Although Newsom’s name frequently appears on lists of hypothetical Biden replacements, she is already on the ticket and is seen by many as the heir-apparent.

Regardless, both are publicly saying now, again and again, that they are backing Biden.

This story incorporates prior reporting and interviews from CalMatters’ 2020 election coverage.

Federal immigration agents detained at least two people late Friday outside Adventist White Memorial Hospital in Boyle Heights, where protesters had gathered after reports of immigration enforcement activity, according to rapid response groups. Protesters remained at the hospital into the early hours of Saturday, where immigration agents maintained a large presence.

It appears the incident began after people witnessed someone being detained and taken into the hospital, according to Raquel Roman, executive director of Proyecto Pastoral and member of the Boyle Heights Immigrant Rights Network.   That spurred a crowd of protesters to rally against ICE agents, who then detained two protesters who are U.S. citizens, Roman said.

ICE activity was also reported near Mariachi Plaza at 5:50 a.m. Saturday, according to witnesses, and outside the East LA Sheriff’s Station, where agents have been seen detaining people in the L.A. County-designated ICE-Free zone. 

Arrests captured on social video

Video posted on social media appears to show one person being detained outside the hospital. In the video, at least three officers in tactical vests are seen detaining someone at the intersection of Boyle and Pennsylvania Avenues around 11:30 p.m.

A group of about six more officers in tactical vests and masks can be seen walking around the area as another, whose vest says “Police ICE,” yells at the person recording to “back up” and “do not impede with the arrest.”

“You’re arresting U.S. citizens,” the person recording says. “18 USC 111, they’re interfering,” the officer replies, referring to Title 18, Section 111 of the U.S. Code: Assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees. 

In the video, a bystander who says the person being arrested is his brother can be seen speaking to the officer. 

“Your brother assaulted a federal agent. He’s being arrested for assaulting a federal agent; he’s coming with us,” the officer tells them. 

Boyle Heights Beat reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for more information about the incident but has not yet received a response.

LAPD response

The Los Angeles Police Department was first called to the scene at 11:59 p.m. to respond to a “large group causing a disturbance,” according to LAPD Officer Norma Eisenman. LAPD responded again at 2:24 a.m. as crowds continued to gather outside of the hospital. 

“Officers responded to maintain public safety and keep the peace. At no point did LAPD officers assist federal immigration authorities with enforcement activities or detain any individuals in connection with immigration enforcement,” Eisenman said. 

Video posted on social media by Izzy Ramirez shows a line of agents blocking the emergency loading dock around 2:30 a.m. as a crowd continues to shout at the agents and make noise.

“It was horrible for the local community. The ICE presence was a lot more than I’ve seen it visibly before,” said Roman. 

What the hospital said

Japhet De Oliveira, corporate communications executive at Adventist Health, shared the following statement:

“Federal agents brought a person in their custody to our emergency department, and we cared for that patient with dignity and privacy, as we do for every patient. When agents formed a line across our ambulance entrance, which we did not request nor authorize, we diverted ambulances to nearby hospitals for about two hours to ensure every patient received timely care. White Memorial does not participate in immigration enforcement. We know last night frightened our neighbors. No matter what happens outside our doors, everyone who comes inside is our patient, and our focus will only be on that patient, and it will not change.”

Doctors at Adventist White Memorial last year reported that ICE agents were violating the privacy rights of detained patients and prohibiting contact with patients’ family members. While the hospital released guidelines to protect patients and support staff,  doctors and advocates have said they fall short.

What's next

Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents Boyle Heights, said she was “deeply troubled” by the reports overnight and demanded answers from hospital leadership. She said:

The Boyle Heights Immigrant Rights Network said it plans to lead a protest against ICE outside White Memorial at 2 p.m. Saturday.

This is a developing story and will be updated. 

The post ICE detains two U.S. citizens protesting outside White Memorial Hospital, rapid response groups say appeared first on LA Local.

A California appeals court has found that “ER” and “The Pitt” have enough similarity that a lawsuit brought by the widow and estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton alleging “The Pitt” is an unauthorized reboot can move forward.

A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled unanimously on Wednesday that the trial court judge was correct to reject a motion to throw out the case from “The Pitt” production company Warner Bros. Television, which also produced “ER.” But the judges dismissed Noah Wyle — the star of both shows and a producer on “The Pitt” — as a defendant along with two other producers who worked on both series.

The lawsuit is a clash between the makers of multiple Emmy-winning TV series that were each among the most important and acclaimed shows of their eras.

Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park” and many other novels that became hit movies and TV shows, wrote the pilot script for “ER,” the NBC show about a Chicago emergency room that redefined the medical drama genre and drew tens of millions of weekly viewers in its run from 1994 to 2009.

The lawsuit brought by Sherri Crichton was filed two years ago, before a single episode of “The Pitt” had aired. The HBO Max series that shows a real-time day in the life of a Pittsburgh emergency department has since become perhaps the most lauded series in television, winning two Emmys for best drama for its first two seasons and two best actor Emmys for Wyle.

Along with more technical legal issues, the judges had to decide whether the shows had at least the minimal similarity that would give the lawsuit enough merit to move forward. Their decision applies only to this early legal challenge and they did not rule on whether the plaintiffs had proved the “The Pitt” is derivative of “ER.”

The court agreed with the plaintiff that “both shows provide commentaries on the healthcare system; they focus specifically on the emergency room and the difficult conditions under which the medical staff operates. Both shows take place, with little exception, in the emergency room, as opposed to other medical shows which track patients as they move out of the emergency room, or indeed never enter it.”

The opinion also said that both feature “very fast pacing, and reactions to multiple overlapping crises. The fast-paced dialogue is (to a layperson) frequently incomprehensible shorthand and jargon, lending an air of immediacy and accuracy.”

Warner Bros. Television said in a statement that “WBTV continues to maintain that ‘The Pitt’ is an entirely original series and that the claims against it are without merit. Nothing in the Court of Appeal’s decision establishes otherwise, and WBTV looks forward to defending its position as the case proceeds.”

The defendants argued in legal filings that the shows have “generic similarities” that would exist in “any dramatic story” that features “overworked doctors and staff.”

The panel also unanimously dismissed as defendants Wyle, John Wells, who created “The Pitt” and worked on “ER,” and R. Scott Gemmill, a “Pitt” executive producer who also worked on both shows. The judges found there was no evidence the three men knew the provisions of the Crichton contract that the lawsuit alleges they interfered with.

Sherri Crichton’s lawsuit alleges “The Pitt” is a rebranded version of an unauthorized “ER” reboot that she had rejected.

Her husband had secured a coveted “frozen rights” provision in his contract for the series, prohibiting Warner Bros. from proceeding with any sequels, remakes, spinoffs or other productions derived from “ER” without Crichton’s consent, or his estate’s consent after his death from cancer in 2008.

After the production company could not reach an agreement with Sherri Crichton over a proposed “ER” reboot, the TV studio proceeded to develop and produce a series based on the same premise without permission, the lawsuit alleges.

People may have been getting high off cannabis earlier than previously thought — at least 2,800 years ago, a new study suggests.

Archaeologists who led a dig at a monumental tomb in Siberia said they turned up evidence of the earliest known use of cannabis for psychoactive purposes.

The findings point to cannabis consumption at least 300 years earlier than previously known use in neighboring China.

Ancient drug use has long intrigued scholars. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about inhabitants of Central Asia smoking cannabis around 440 B.C., and recent archaeologists have found the seeds in tombs across its highlands.

The team from Germany, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland said analysis of hair in the royal tomb where cannabis seeds turned up sheds new light on the plant’s role in ancient societies.

“It’s extremely rare that we have both preserved plant parts and human soft tissue with the active compounds in it in the same context,” said co-author Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the University of Bern.

It’s not clear whether the cannabis was consumed through inhalation or ingestion, he said.

The dig took place starting in 2017 at a large burial mound at the Tunnug 1 site in the Uyuk Valley of southern Siberia, home to one of the earliest monumental tombs showing material culture of the Scythians — ancient nomads who migrated from Central Asia to southern Russia and Ukraine.

The team, deployed “essentially out in the middle of nowhere,” lived in tents for months and faced a spring-to-autumn season that variously featured swamps, snowstorms, frosts and swarms of mosquitoes. Herds of horses ran freely across the grassy steppe.

Larger artifacts on the site include weapons in the burials, horse gear and animal-style motifs. But the team “struck gold” as it also found tiny black spots that turned out to be cannabis seeds along with preserved human hair, Caspari said.

“It’s only so often as an archaeologist that you do get to drug test a person that’s been dead for almost 3,000 years,” he said.

Radiocarbon dating on some of the more than 1,000 seeds helped establish the time of origin, and “they are not there by accident” but deposited within the tomb, suggesting that the plant material had significance in the community, he said.

Results were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Not all independent experts were convinced.

The hair analysis “is scientifically weak” and there’s not enough evidence to tell whether cannabis was used, wrote Volker Auwaerter, head of the forensic toxicology section at the University Medical Center in Freiburg, Germany, in an email.

“For a central part of the study, the article falls far short of what would have been possible,” Auwaerter said. “This matters because the hair data carry the abstract’s main claims (cannabis consumption and use for its psychoactive properties).”

Today, scholars don’t consider ancient accounts trustworthy without corroborating evidence. Because the cannabis plant has other uses — seeds are pressed for oil and fibers used for cloth — their presence alone doesn’t confirm drug use.

Auwaerter, who was not part of the study, said the data didn’t distinguish consumption from external exposure — in other words, the hair could have picked up traces of weed simply by being buried together with it. He said a lab test involving forensic toxicology expertise would have been advisable and easy to arrange.

But Elisa Guerra Doce of the University of Valladolid in Spain, who has written about use of consciousness-altering substances in European prehistory, said toxicological hair analysis was not new in archaeology and has been used to identify consumption of psychoactive substances. She was not involved in the study.

In an email, she credited the authors for showing, through their methodology, that “cannabis was not merely deposited as a funerary offering but was actually consumed by individuals associated with the burial rite.”

Micki Boden wanted a wedding cake that checked off a couple of big boxes — personalized and tasty. Instead of a traditional tiered cake, the San Fernando Valley native went with a favorite from her school days.

“My favorite cake of all time is the coffee cake that I ate through my entire K-12 education going to LAUSD public school,” Boden said.

Boden attended elementary school in Studio City and middle school in Sherman Oaks before graduating from a Reseda high school.

Boden and her husband, Matt Stollman, met in 2016 while working on the reality television show Big Brother and eventually started dating. The two got engaged in 2025.

With the groom’s family traveling from the East Coast for their wedding in October, the couple wanted to provide a uniquely L.A. experience.

Micki Boden and Matt Stollman cut into their LAUSD coffee cake wedding cake.

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Micki Boden

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“We wanted something that was gonna be fun, that was gonna be memorable for people,” Boden said.

They held their wedding at the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys, surrounded by San Fernando Valley memorabilia, and got a California favorite — an In-N-Out truck — to serve guests.

The search for a cake that fit 

But when it came to the wedding cake, the couple struggled to find something suitable. Neither Boden nor Stollman liked frosting, and traditional wedding cakes didn’t excite them.

“We explored the more traditional tiered cake setup, and it just wasn’t meshing well,” Boden said.

Boden kept returning to the coffee cake she ate throughout her years in public school. Los Angeles Unified School District had published its official recipe online, but she wasn’t confident she could bake it herself. So she reached out to the district to ask for help.

The Stollman's wedding cake, decorated by the chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa, sits in a pastry box.

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Micki Boden

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How LAUSD made it happen 

Thomas Cohen, a public relations representative at the district, and Manish Singh, the director of food services, arranged for a chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa to prepare the wedding cake. The chef also shaped part of the cake into a heart just for the couple.

Singh said the district doesn’t take cake orders from the public — but made this exception.

“We were doing it just to make one of our Angelenos, an ex-LAUSD student, make her special day even more special,” Singh said.

For the bride, it was the icing on her big day.

“I think it’s all just part of being an L.A. student,” she said. “The fact that we have these amazing memories from childhood, I think it’s just so meaningful for a lot of people.”