Some scientists are worried data may be lost in the next administration, the latest on CA's high speed rail project, the best strategies for visiting Santa.
What Trump's pick for the Interior Department means for California
Think of some of the top issues here in the West: water, public parks, energy, ocean resources. A lot of those fall – at least in large part – under the Department of the Interior. And Donald Trump's pick to head the agency will have a lot of influence. Trump's choice is Ryan Zinke, a first-term Republican representative from Montana.
That choice, if confirmed by the Senate, could carry big implications for the Golden State, where about half the land in the state is public, said Jon Christensen at UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
"Parks, energy, endangered species – those are the big issues for California," he said. The Interior Department can wield great influence over all of these areas.
Zinke calls himself a "Teddy Roosevelt" Republican, in reference to the former president credited with preserving public lands, but the Montana lawmaker has also received dismal ratings – just 3 percent over his career – from the League of Conservation Voters.
"We'll really have to wait and see how it develops," said Christensen.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
Climate scientists preserve research ahead of Trump presidency
It's pretty hard to discount the fears of climate scientists who say they are worried about Donald Trump's move into the White House.
He's called climate change a hoax.
He's tapped a climate skeptic to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
And, he's asked officials at the Energy Department for the names of those involved in climate meetings.
Now, many scientists are worried he may be coming for their data.
A grass roots effort to download and preserve federal climate data has begun -- out of fear it may disappear during the next administration.
Jason Koebler writes for the Vice channel Motherboard. He spoke with Take Two's Sanden Totten for more.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
3 things to know about the ongoing California high-speed rail project
Hop on a train here in L.A., hop off in San Francisco two hours later.
That's the promise of California's long-planned high-speed rail line. But building a track across the state, and a train that goes 220 miles per hour costs money—a lot of money.
On Tuesday, California's High Speed Rail Authority took a big step forward in financing the project.
For more on that big step and an overall update on the project, reporter Tim Sheehan with the Fresno Bee spoke with Alex Cohen.
1. The latest in funding.
"They adopted two different funding plans, which are required by the 2008 bond measure that voters passed. What these two funding plans do is they're a key to unlocking some of the bond funds to be able to match federal funds that have been allocated to this. One of the funding plans is for here in the central San Joaquin valley where they need about $2.6 billion dollars...to match part of the $3 billion that the federal government has applied toward this.
Up in the San Francisco bay area between San Francisco and San Jose they want to unlock another $600 million dollars in proposition 1A money to help with the electrification of CalTrain commuter train tracks which would be shared with high speed rail trains eventually."
2. The price tag for phase one? About $64 billion.
"For the entire phase one, what they identify as phase one which is...Los Angeles to San Francisco, they're talking about $64 billion dollars all told. To get from Bakersfield to San Jose which they're proposing as their first operating segment they're talking about $20 or $25 billion...
So, what they've identified solid funding for is San Francisco to San Jose for the Caltrans electrification and also roughly Bakersfield to Madera just north of Fresno at approximately $7 billion"
3. Who will run the trains?
"The third big action they took yesterday was authorizing the staff to seek qualifications from train operating companies to see who might eventually help guide the design of this project to maximize it for potential operations. What they want to do is make sure that as they build and design this project that it is something that is optimized for an operating company that will eventually bid to run these trains.
From there they would narrow it down and seek formal bids and they're looking at somewhere around the range of $30 million for the first stage of this contract, which would be consulting on the design of the system."
Sheehan also spoke about the next several steps in the process and one of the main roadblocks the project is facing.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
Asian-Americans furious over readers' letters in the LA Times
It was a fairly standard travel story published in the Los Angeles Times.
But it sparked a controversy that left Asian-Americans furious.
The original Nov. 28 article was about national parks that served as reminders of America's history on race relations and civil rights.
Two of the California sites included former internment camps where Japanese-Americans were forcibly held and isolated during World War II.
Then came the responses.
The paper published two reader reactions to that story in the "Letters to the Editor" section.
As the U.S. was putting families into the internment housing and feeding them, the Japanese were slaughtering Filipinos by the tens of thousands and U.S. soldiers after hideous torture.
War is evil, but I would have much rather been interned by the U.S. in California than by the Japanese in their captured lands.
– Dick Venn
Meanwhile, another wrote:
Virtually everyone in the U.S. was assigned jobs to help the war effort. The Japanese were assigned the job of staying out of the way and not causing complications. Millions of Americans were assigned far worse jobs. Hundreds of thousands were wounded or died.
The interned Japanese were housed, fed, protected and cared for. Many who now complain would not even be alive if the internment had not been done.
– Steve Hawes, Sunland
The backlash was almost immediate.
"Slaves were also housed and fed, but nobody would argue that slavery was a good thing," said Koji Sakai, former vice president of programming at the Japanese American National Museum.
"Get out of here with that s**t," posted Phil Yu on his blog Angry Asian Man. "There is no other side of this history. The wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans is widely and officially acknowledged as one of the most egregious civil rights violations in our nation's history."
The U.S. government is very clear on the subject, too—in 1988, it officially apologized to Japanese-Americans and gave each surviving internee $20,000 in reparations, calling the camps a "grave injustice."
"The Japanese-Americans' civil rights were taken away from them, they lost everything. Including my family: they lost their house, they their property and they lost many years of their lives," said Sakai. "For a lot of Japanese-Americans, we righted a historic wrong, and now we're retrying these moments in history."
The Times declined to be interviewed by KPCC about this but did address the controversy on its own site, saying, "Davan Maharaj, editor-in-chief and publisher of The Times, said the letters did not meet the newspaper’s standards for 'civil, fact-based discourse' and should not have been published."
Sakai agrees: while a Letters to the Editor section is where open conversations can happen, he argues the Times should have curated it better to only allow in comments rooted in facts.
"It was full of historical inaccuracies," he says.
But he's especially worried that people will walk away thinking that a community can be okay with internment camps because he's seen that idea popping up recently.
"Within the last year, with all the rhetoric around the presidential election on both sides of the aisle, people said, 'Maybe we should lock up Muslim-Americans.' People have been using the Japanese-American incarceration as a precedent," he said. "It's important that it doesn't happen to anybody else."
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
Sports roundup: Rams fire Coach, MLB bans hazing, football goes overseas
Will the Rams enter a new phase after the firing of Jeff Fisher? The National Football League looks to expand its presence abroad. And Major League Baseball ends a long – and controversial – tradition of hazing for young rookies in the clubhouse.
For the latest, Alex Cohen spoke with
.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
Sups approve plan to support women and girls in LA County
Los Angeles County leaders took a big step this week to make sure women and girls get equal treatment.
The LA County Board of Supervisors approved a five-year effort that directs all 37 county departments to watch out for the needs of women and girls. The initiative takes a three-prong approach: it will look out for women and girls in the services it provides, as well as women working with or employed by the county.
Women and girls in LA County are disproportionately affected by poverty in LA County -- nearly 20 percent live in poverty. And, since 2013, there's been a 55 percent increase in the number of homeless women. Alex Cohen spoke with Supervisor Hilda Solis, who introduced the initiative with Supervisor Sheila Kuehl. Solis, a former Congresswoman and U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Obama, explained the reason behind the initiative and the change she hopes it will bring about.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
Study: Inland Empire leads the state in tenant evictions
The real estate firm Redfin is shining a spotlight on eviction rates across the country this week.
Researchers there say there is no national database tracking renter evictions. For the report, Redfin analyzed public records, including data from California.
How California stacks up
"Much to my surprise, we actually do better than the country," says Richard Green, director of USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate.
Green says the Redfin numbers surprised him, given the high cost of rent in the state.
"Nationally, the eviction rate is in the neighborhood of five percent, and we don't have any [metropolitian areas] where eviction rates are quite that high."
Eye on the Inland Empire
Tenancy in California may be a prettier picture than in, say, California's neighbor Nevada, but that doesn't mean that everything is coming up California poppies. In the Inland Empire, which includes San Bernardino and Riverside counties, the eviction rate is over three percent, according to the Redfin report.
Rents are lower in the Inland Empire, but USC's Richard Green says, so are incomes.
"If you look at per capita income in San Bernardino County, it's about thirty percent lower than it is in Los Angeles County," Green says. "Riverside County is about 25 percent lower."
As a result, tenants who may be barely getting by may find themselves in a precarious position.
"If people have just one financial event happen in their life — something as simple as [blowing out] a tire on their car — they're much more vulnerable than people closer to the Pacific Ocean," Green says.
Inland Empire renters living paycheck to paycheck could quickly find themselves unable to make ends meet.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
Struggling to breathe in heavily industrialized Paramount
An investigation into how the Park Service is failing its female workers
The National Park Service is the federal agency tasked with protecting America's beloved public lands.
This year, the Park Service celebrated its 100th birthday, but celebrations were marred by disturbing charges that the agency failed to keep its own workers safe.
Female employees of the parks, monuments and historic sites say they've been sexually harassed and bullied, and NPS has failed to stop it.
Over the last year, High Country News editorial fellow Lyndsey Gilpin has been investigating these charges. She joined Take Two to discuss her latest reporting.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
'Tis the season for Santa pictures: tips for how and where to take them
The holidays are upon us. It's that time of year to take smiling, happy pictures with your family and share them with the world.... it's a way to share the joy!
But taking that photo can be an experience filled with some entirely different emotions.
Need tips for how and where to take those pics with Santa? We have you covered. Yvonne Condes is editor and co-founder of MomsLA.com. She spoke to Alex Cohen about making the Santa photo session experience a little easier.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
The Styled Side: Does this shade of green say 2017?
2016 is almost out of here (which some of you might cheer at), and the new year is almost upon us.
That means we're looking into a Swarovski crystal ball to find out what might drive fashion and style in 2017.
And it's 15-0343.
That's Pantone's code for Greenery, recently named the Color of the Year for 2017.
"Pantone is considered the design world's ultimate authority on color," says Michelle Dalton Tyree of Fashion Trends Daily.
The organization standardizes colors using codes so everyone around the globe from fashion designers to home decorators are speaking the same language; if you have different people working on a single project, for example, you want to make sure they all use the same shade you have in mind.
"Every year, they also come up with a color of the year," says Tyree. "Pantone sets the trends and chooses a color based on those trends they are seeing."
Last year's colors, Rose Quartz and Serenity (a soft pink and blue, respectively), had a big impact on home furnishings.
"If you look at companies such as West Elm and Anthropologie, you'll see that there were a lot of couches, chairs and accessories, particularly in that rose quartz, dusty pink," says Tyree. "In fact, West Elm just revealed a sneak peak of their spring line and they're still banking heavily on those softer colors."
For 2017, Pantone is looking towards Greenery because they say it's a life-affirming shade.
"It was chosen to satisfy our growing desire to rejuvenate, revitalize and unite," says Leatrice Eisman, Pantone's executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. "It also symbolizes the reconnection we seek with nature, one another and a larger purpose."
"Surprisingly enough, Mercedes chose it for their new Mercedes AMG-GT-R," says Tyree, "and we've already seen it on the runways from Gucci, Balenciaga and more."
Pantone is also partnering with Airbnb for an upcoming experience that they will unveil soon, too, so you might see the color appear as part of that campaign.
You're either going to love it or hate it – or think it's the color of Kermit the Frog – but you better make peace with Greenery because you're going to start seeing it sprout up everywhere.