The Brief

A decade after the shocking discovery of a bear cub carcass in Manhattan’s Central Park, the mystery of who dumped it there has finally been solved.

And the man taking responsibility is none other than presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The conspiracy theorist-turned-third-party candidate’s campaign has weathered a series of increasingly improbable-sounding scandals in recent months, from Kennedy’s admission that a worm ate part of his brain to his denial of reports that he once ate barbecued dog (he said it was a goat).

RFK unleashed this latest one himself, in a three-minute video posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday.

It shows him sitting at a kitchen table, telling an incredulous-looking Roseanne Barr (yes, the canceled comedian) about how the dead bear ended up in his van upstate and, ultimately, on top of a bicycle beneath a bush in New York City’s largest urban park.

Kennedy, an animal lover and former environmental lawyer, says he was driving upstate early one morning to take a group of people falconing in the Hudson Valley when a driver in front of him fatally hit a bear cub.

“So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van, because I was gonna skin the bear,” he explains matter-of-factly. “It was in very good condition and I was gonna put the meat in my refrigerator.”

Kennedy added that it is legal in New York State to get a bear tag to take home a roadkill bear. Such a tag must be written up by a law enforcement officer.

The bear never made it back to his Westchester home, however.

Kennedy says he got waylaid by a busy day of falconry, and then had to rush back to New York City for a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House, which ran late.

“I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” Kennedy continues.

Then, as he put it, “the little bit of the redneck in me” had an idea.

Kennedy just happened to have an old bike in his car, which he said someone had asked him to get rid of. He recalled that the city “had just put in the bike lanes” after a number of serious accidents, and decided to stage the bear in Central Park as if it had been hit by a bike.

“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” Kennedy said. “So we went and did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it, or something.”

Florence Slatkin, with her dog Paco, points to the spot where she and a friend discovered a dead bear cub in New York's Central Park, on Oct. 7, 2014.

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Richard Drew

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AP

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The six-month-old, 44-pound cub made national news after a dog walker stumbled upon it that fateful October morning, in a wide-open part of the park right near the path where thousands of people run and bike each day.

Weirdly enough, one of the New York Times reporters who covered the mystery was Caroline Kennedy’s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg, RJK Jr.'s first cousin once removed. She told the paper this weekend that “like law enforcement, I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story.”

Law enforcement took the bear to Albany for analysis and determined that it had been hit by a car, likely outside the park. They also confiscated the bicycle to test for fingerprints.

“I was worried because my prints were all over that bike,” Kennedy says in the video, drawing laughs from the room.

But the mystery remained unsolved, and the story eventually faded away. Now, almost 10 years later, Kennedy said he was prompted to come clean ahead of an anticipated New Yorker exposé: “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one,” he captioned the video.

“They asked me, the fact checkers, and, you know, it’s gonna be a bad story,” he says with a laugh.

The New Yorker piece, published online Monday morning, situates the bear anecdote within a larger look at Kennedy’s famously checkered past and motivations for running.

It also includes a photo of Kennedy, who was 60 at the time, posing with his hands inside the bear’s bloody mouth and an exaggerated grimace on his face.

“Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” he told the magazine.

Kennedy also made headlines during the Republican National Convention in July after a leaked call with former President Donald Trump captured the Republican nominee criticizing vaccines (a stance for which Kennedy is famous) and appealing to Kennedy with a vague, “I would love for you to do something.”

Kennedy apologized to the president and, seeking to quash speculation, vowed to stay in the race. But he has seen his support dwindle — down to single digits in several national polls — in the weeks since President Biden announced his withdrawal. His fight to get onto state ballots has reportedly been a financial drain, and he’s canceled multiple campaign appearances over the last month.

For the last 70 years, the  27th Street Bakery hasn’t just been the go-to place for people who want to spend less time in the kitchen — it’s become a staple in South Central, providing jobs and security for people living in the neighborhood.

The bakery is Black-owned and in its third generation as a business. It’s co-owned by sisters Denise Cravin-Paschal and Olympic gold-medalist Jeanette Bolden-Pickens, as well as her husband Al Pickens.

“My grandfather employed a lot of people around here as he was growing his business and so have we,” Cravin-Paschal told the LA Local. “They feel that this is a safe place to come. We have the respect of being here for 70 years and so we enjoy it.”

The bakery sits on Central Avenue, the focal point of Black Los Angeles between the 1930s and 1960s. As segregation laws were struck down, Black people in LA began to move elsewhere and took their businesses with them. The bakery, though, is still Black-owned and operating 70 years later.

Today it is considered the largest manufacturer of sweet potato pies on the West Coast, the bakery’s website states. Last year, the city and District 9 Councilmember Curren Price Jr. presented the bakery with a plaque that reads: “A Walk Down Central Avenue — A legacy of community: powered by the people and its places.”

It hangs on the wall in the bakery’s lobby along with several other photos and recognitions they’ve received over the years.

“Our goal is to keep this legacy alive and we’re celebrating 70 years of being here in business. We are so grateful to the community,” Bolden-Pickens said.

In celebration of its anniversary, a sign in the bakery says it is offering one slice of sweet potato pie for 70 cents on Saturdays starting this weekend through Oct. 31.

The bakery was a restaurant at first bringing Southern flavor to LA

The bakery began as a restaurant in the 1930s on Central Avenue founded by Harry and Sadie Patterson, according to the family and Los Angeles Conservancy. Back then, Central Avenue was the epicenter of LA’s Black community and Patterson, who came from Shreveport, Louisiana, decided to bring his Southern recipes to life in Los Angeles.

The restaurant later became a bakery in 1956, according to the bakery’s website. Patterson’s daughter Alberta Cravin and her son Gregory Spann took over the bakery in 1980. After Spann passed away, Cravin’s daughters — the sisters who are current owners — took over the family business. Five other relatives also help them out, Cravin-Paschal said.

These days, the bakery is open Tuesday through Saturday each week and the bulk of their customers are other businesses. They serve nearly 300 vendors including convenience stores like 7-Eleven, Ralphs grocery stores, Smart & Final, ARCO gas stations, restaurants and other mom-and-pop stores. Louisiana Fried Chicken has been a customer since 1980, Cravin-Paschal said.

An average delivery today is usually 45 dozen pies and they also ship orders out of state, Cravin-Paschal said.

She also told The LA Local they have six full time employees and most of them have worked for the bakery at least 25 years.

“I like working here, I like the people,” Maximina “Maxi” Rodriguez, a longtime employee, told The LA Local. After 32 years at the bakery, she said she plans to retire in June. “I’m going to miss it.”

Rodriguez said working at the bakery is a family affair for her, too. Her sister, Guadalupe Garibaldi, has worked at the bakery for over 40 years and her niece, Yoselin Garibaldi, is now a cashier and driver.

Patterson’s lessons inspired 3 generations to keep the business running

For Bolden-Pickens and Cravin-Paschal, running the bakery is a labor of love. Both told The LA Local that their grandfather taught them to stay true to the fresh ingredients they use and not to cut corners.

These lessons helped Bolden-Pickens in her life before taking over the family business. She won a gold medal as part of the U.S. 4×100 meter relay team in track and field during the 1984 Olympics.

“What I learned from being an Olympian is that it takes a lot of hard work. I learned that from my grandfather,” she said.

Bolden-Pickens said it hasn’t been easy running the business, but they’ve been able to stay afloat because of the lessons learned from their grandfather.

“I remember during the pandemic, we actually had to go to the egg farm and stand in line for a couple of hours just to get the eggs that we needed,” Bolden-Pickens said. “We use the best spices. We make our own vanilla.”

Cravin-Paschal said after the death of their brother Gregory Spann, who was the main baker for nearly two decades, they struggled for a few years to keep the recipe and taste consistent. But eventually they figured it out.

“We had a little rough spot because we all know the recipes but you have to put it together (correctly),” Cravin-Paschal said. “Now we’re back to the original taste.”

As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.

"This is very, very, very worrying," says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn't involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Strong study design

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

They found that the teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were at a higher risk of being diagnosed with several mental health conditions a few years later, compared to teens who didn't use cannabis.

Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.

Now, only a small fraction — nearly 4,000 — of all teens in the study were diagnosed with each of these two disorders. Both bipolar and psychotic disorders are among the most serious and disabling of mental illnesses.

"Those are the scarier conditions that we worry about," says Sultan.

Silver points out these illnesses are expensive to treat and come at a high cost to society. The U.S. cannabis market is an industry with a value in the tens-of-billions — but the societal cost of schizophrenia has been calculated to be $350 billion a year.

"And if we increase the number of people who develop that condition in a way that's preventable, that can wipe out the whole value of the cannabis market," Silver says.

Depression and anxiety too

The new study also found that the risk for more common conditions like depression and anxiety was also higher among cannabis users.

"Depression alone went up by about a third," says Silver, "and anxiety went up by about a quarter."

But the link between cannabis use and depression and anxiety got weaker for teens who were older when they used cannabis. "Which really shows the sensitivity of the younger child's brain to the effects of cannabis," says Silver. "The brain is still developing. The effects of cannabis on the receptors in the brain seem to have a significant impact on their neurological development and the risk for these mental health disorders."

Silver hopes these findings will make teens more cautious about using the drug, which is not as safe as people perceive it to be.

"With legalization, we've had a tremendous wave of this perception of cannabis as a safe, natural product to treat your stress with," she says. "That is simply not true."

The new study is well designed and gets at "the chicken or the egg, order-of-operations question," says Sultan. There have been other past studies that have also found a link between cannabis use and mental health conditions, especially psychosis. But, those studies couldn't tell whether cannabis affected the likelihood of developing mental health symptoms or whether people with existing problems were more likely to use cannabis — perhaps to treat their symptoms.

But by excluding teens who were already showing mental health symptoms, the new study suggests a causal link between cannabis use and later mental health diagnoses. Additional research is needed to understand the link fully.

'Playing with fire'

Sultan, the psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University, says the study confirms what he's seeing in his clinic — more teens using cannabis who've developed new or worsening mental health symptoms.

"It is most common around anxiety and depression, but it's also showing up in more severe conditions like bipolar disorder and psychosis," he says.

He notes that mental health disorders are complex in origin. A host of risk factors, like genetics, environment, lifestyle and life experiences all play a role. And some young people are more at risk than others.

"When someone has a psychotic episode in the context of cannabis or a manic episode in the context of cannabis, clinicians are going to say, 'Please do not do that again because you're you're you're playing with fire,'" he says.

Because the more they use the drug, he says the more likely that their symptoms will worsen over time, making recovery harder.

"What we're worried about [is if] you sort of get stuck in psychosis, it gets harder and harder to pull the person back," says Sultan. "Psychosis and severe mood disorders, particularly bipolar disorder are like seizures in your brain. They're sort of neurotoxic to your brain, and so it seems to be associated with a more rapid deterioration of the brain."

Some electric bikes in California could soon require license plates under a proposed state bill aiming to address the rise in electric bike related injuries.

AB 1942 or the E-bike Accountability Act, would apply exclusively to Class 2 and Class 3 electric bikes.

Class 2 bikes can be operated without peddling until it reaches the speed of 20 mph.

Class 3 bikes reach a max speed of 28 mph; motor assist could only kick in with peddling.

The bill would also require owners to carry proof of ownership and would direct the Department of Motor Vehicles to establish a registration process. It was introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of Orinda in Contra Costa County earlier this month.

E-bike injuries spiked 18-fold between 2018 and 2023, according to state traffic data.

The bill may be heard in committee March 16.

NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6.

That's the launch date that the space agency is now working toward following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"This is really getting real," says Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator of NASA's exploration systems development mission directorate. "It's time to get serious and start getting excited."

But she cautioned that there's still some pending work that remains to be done out at the launch pad, and officials will have to conduct a multi-day flight readiness review late next week to make sure that every aspect of the mission is truly ready to go.

"We need to successfully navigate all of those, but assuming that happens, it puts us in a very good position to target March 6th," she says, noting that the flight readiness review will be "extensive and detailed."

The Artemis II test flight will send four astronauts on an approximately 600,000-mile trip around the moon and back. It will mark the first time that people have ventured to the moon since the final Apollo lunar mission in 1972.

When NASA workers first tested out fueling the rocket earlier this month, they encountered problems like a liquid hydrogen leak. Swapping out some seals and other work seems to have fixed these issues, according to officials who say that the latest countdown dress rehearsal went smoothly, despite glitches such as a loss of ground communications in the Launch Control Center that forced workers to temporarily use backups.

Members of the Artemis II crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — are starting their roughly two-week quarantine to limit their exposure to illnesses before their flight.

Glaze says she spoke to several of the astronauts during the recent test fueling, as they were in Florida to observe the preparations. "They're all very, very excited," she says. "They are really getting a lot of anticipation for a potential launch in March."

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