Today, we take a look at how conservatives are discussing the issue of immigration at the annual CPAC meeting. Then, concussion businesses are growing out of the NFL's increased concern about head injuries, Tess Vigeland explores Boyle Heights and much more.
Conservatives convene on immigration issues at annual CPAC meeting
Conservative Republicans from around the nation are gathered in Washington DC this week for the annual meeting known as CPAC.
Attendees at the 40th Conservative Political Action Conference are trying to recover from bruising election results last fall, and many of them believe a new approach to immigration reform is the key to future success.
For more on this we're joined now by Alex Burns, national reporter for Politico.
Jerry Brown's $23-billion delta tunnels plan faces steep competition
Jerry Brown has water on his mind. Yesterday, the Governor unveiled a $23 billion plan to overhaul how the state moves water from north to south. The proposal calls for two 35-mile long underground tunnels that would divert the Sacramento river under a sensitive wild life area.
And while the plan for this new plumbing is still in the developmental stages, critics are already coming out against it.
Here to fill us in is Paul Rogers, environmental reporter for San Jose Mercury News.
Friday Flashback: US stock market, Marco Rubio at CPAC and more
Time for our weekly review of the news, The Friday Flashback. Here with us in the studio, James Rainey, political columnist for the LA Times and from New York, Heidi Moore, U.S. finance and economics editor for The Guardian economic and fiscal policy correspondent for The National Journal.
Neighborhoods: Exploring the rich history and culture of Boyle Heights
Millions of people live in the city, occupying diverse neighborhoods like Little Tokyo, Echo Park and Glassell Park. But how much of the city do you really know? Take Two's new series, Neighborhoods, hopes to change what we know, or think we know about the city. First up, Boyle Heights. Tess Vigeland Reports.
You can't miss Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights. There's a large gazebo just outside the rainbow-hued entrance to a Gold Line subway stop, and murals cover the walls outside a bookstore and frozen yogurt stand.
When this piece of land was part of Mexico, it was known as El Paredon Blanco, or white bluffs. It's current namesake, Irishman Andrew Boyle, almost didn't make it through the Mexican American War.
"He was from Ireland, they came looking for their father, he and his brothers and sisters. Their father left Ireland, and about a year later they went on a ship and they came to seek their father, which they never found," said Diana Ybarra, President of the Boyle Heights Historical Society. "Then he connects with an Irish group in San Patricio, Texas. They're fighting in the Mexican American War, and Andrew Boyle is captured along with several other prominent American soldiers. The Mexican soldiers are ready to shoot them in front of the firing squad, but apparently the family of Andrew Boyle, his sister, had been hospitable to the soldiers when they went to her home. So right before they're ready to pick him up and put him in front of the firing squad, a Mexican lieutenant comes and says, 'Today is your lucky day, you're going to live.'"
Andrew Boyle eventually made his way to California and paid $4,000 for 22 acres on the bluffs, where his neighbors, the Lopez and Rubio families already had farmsteads.
"If you were to look at the old maps you would notice that the property is a hillside, and in the old days we had a free-flowing river," said Ybarra. "Just down the street our other landmark, which, this is really interesting because we had Irishmen Andrew Boyle, then we had the Lopez family, but we also had French Basque families because there was sheep herding right up here on Mt. Pleasant."
Boyle Heights was also home to Jewish and Japanese communities in the 1940s and '50s. Ybarra reads from a list of names of kids who, along with her grandparents, graduated from Roosevelt High School in the early 1940s: Greenberg, Cohen, Gless, Shapiro, Sugimoto, Arias.
"First Street, if you're looking South, was the Russian Flats at one time," said Ybarra. "In the 1940s when my parents were here, they were assimilated into the American culture, so when we were brought up we were very mainstream American and we lost a lot of our culture from our heritage, the Mexican culture. What I see now is the complete opposite. You have generations and they're bringing their culture here and almost turning things around so that they're not focused on the American culture, they're maintaining their culture, or they're being bicultural."
Three things you should do in Boyle Heights:
"Of course besides stopping at Mariachi Plaza, take a stroll along Boyle Avenue where you will see many remnants from the early history of the late 1800s, such as the Hollenbeck Palms, Hollenbeck Park and also venture up to the Breed Street Shul. There are quite a few restaurants on first street we're right across from one of the famous ones, La Serenata De Garibaldi, El Tepeyac right up here on Evergreen Avenue. It always has lines and lines of people waiting for their famous Hollenbeck burritos, which I think would feed a family of five," said Ybarra.
How the King Tut tomb exhibition changed museum curation forever
In the late 70s, a curious event took place in Manhattan: the arrival of the “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Millions of people visited, and it caused a huge shift in how museums marketed special collections. We'll talk with Vanity Fair contributing editor David Kamp.
What's behind AEG chief Tim Leiweke's sudden resignation?
Last September, billionaire Phillip Anshutz put his sports and entertainment giant AEG for sale. The $10 billion price tag included the L.A. Kings hockey team, the Staples Center and AEG Live, the 2nd largest presenter of live music in the world.
But no one ponied up the cash.
So, it wasn't surprising when yesterday Anshutz took the "for sale" sign off AEG's window. The surprise was that Tim Leiweke, the president and CEO of AEG, resigned.
L.A. Live was Leiweke's baby, and he was the biggest cheerleader for bringing a football stadium to downtown LA. So what happened?
To explain, we're joined by Arash Markazi, columist for ESPN Los Angeles.
'Concussion businesses' grow around NFL's increased concern about head injuries
There's a lot at stake this Sunday when the NFL begins its annual meeting in Phoenix, Arizona.
Thousands of players have filed lawsuits against the league because of traumatic brain injuries, and so in Phoenix the NFL may enact new rules to cut down on concussions. The league also announced this week it'll spend $60 million to research and develop new technology to prevent future injuries.
But there might be millions more to be had by companies that are springing up to offer their own equipment and products to the league.
Darren Heitner, a sports attorney who wrote the Forbes.com post, "The NFL and the Booming Business of Concussions."
How ratters hack into web cams to spy on your most intimate moments
If you have a laptop or monitor nearby you may notice a little camera. All of those nights you thought you were alone, someone could steal access to that camera and use it as their port hole into your life. And it's actually not all that hard to do.
Nate Anderson has been covering this for Ars Technica.
LA County Science Fair faces $35,000 shortfall
David Zimmerman is very excited to be spending some quality time with his good friend Shewy.
“Well Shewy is my pet name for the bacterium that I work with, which is formally Shewanella Onidensis MR1," he said.
Zimmerman is researching the genetic makeup of Shewy to see how it can be used for real world applications – like generating energy for fuel cells or cleaning out toxic chemicals in our water supply. He spends a lot of his time with Shewy, that is, outside of his classes at Brentwood School. Oh yeah, did I mention he’s in high school?
I caught up with him at a molecular biology lab at USC, where he’s working on his entry into this year’s L.A. County Science Fair. You know, the science fair, that age-old tradition where kids gets to show off their experiments with three fold poster boards and model volcanos. Or in Zimmerman’s case: “Site directed mutagenesis of Shewanella Oneidensis MR1: A novel strategy for genetic engineering," he said.
This is not your grandma's science fair. Next Thursday, some of the county’s brightest students will set up their projects at the pasadena convention center. It’s the oldest and one of the biggest science fairs in the West. Every year, participants go on to earn big scholarships at prestigious universities and internships at the top companies in their field. This year there are an expected 1,500 entrants, but all those projects could end up sitting on the floor.2
“Right now I think the doomsday scenario is we may not have table, chair, pipe and drape," said Dean Gilbert, president of the LA County Science Fair. "We may not have enough medals to give the kids. We may not have any prize money, the scholarships. We may just have a bare building and then judge the projects and acknowledge the kids as winners.”
He said they’re currently about $35,000 short of the $100,000 it costs to put on the fair. That means not being able to rent tables and chairs, or provide food for hundreds of volunteers. Gilbert has managed to get some last-minute donations from high-tech companies, like SpaceX and Raytheon, but not nearly enough to fill the gap.
This might sound surprising given the recent surge in interest in STEM – that is the fields of Science Technology Engineering and Math. President Obama, for one, seems to never stop talking about it, but the L.A. County science fair is not a government program. It’s a privately funded non profit that has seen donations dry up in this tight economic climate.
Professor Michael Bowen at Mount St. Vincent University is one of the top researchers on the benefits of science fairs. He theorizes that it could actually be the time-honored tradition of these events that makes it difficult for them to grab attention.
“In California right now there is a Placer County STEM Exposition, and it promotes itself as an innovative alternative to the typical science fair," said Professor Bowen. "That sounds really cool, whereas, if science fairs are being portrayed as stodgy and dull, where would you put your money if you were a sponsor?”
Participation in science fairs is down across the country, and many schools have dropped it as a requirement due to slashed budgets and an increasing emphasis on test scores. In L.A. County, the number of schools participating has dropped from a peak of about 250 to about 185 over the last decade.
Dean Gilbert says schools and technology companies need to take a second look at science fairs as an opportunity to invest in the economy of tomorrow:
“We have to change that perception. We have to show them science fair projects are not just another event. It’s not just a spelling bee. It’s not just a competition," said Gilbert. "The essence of a science fair project is solving problems using their critical thinking skills and that is really what the job market, the technological workforce is demanding.”
Research has shown that science fairs play an important role in exposing kids to the professional practice of science. David Zimmerman can certainly attest to that. He parlayed his science fair success into a full-time summer position at the USC lab he works in now.
"Science has over the past few years come to mean something really a lot more to me than words in a textbook and that’s really because of the science fair," said Zimmerman. "I’ve gotten this incredible exposure to this world where people actually get paid for figuring out how nature works which is beautiful and unimaginably cool.”
As for his project this year? He’s ready to set up on the floor if need be. His solid foundation in science experiments has helped prepare him for life’s little disappointments.
“There is no such thing as good data or bad data there is just data and it’s expected or unexpected but anyways that’s science. It can be frustrating but you know, such is life," said Zimmerman.
To borrow a metaphor from his beloved Monty Python: “I’m not dead yet!"
Study: 46 percent of working dads say they don't spend enough time with their kids
Yesterday on the show, we talked about a new report from the Pew Research Center which looked at modern parenthood. The big finding for women was that nearly a third of mothers — with kids younger than 18 — preferred working full time. That's a significant increase from just a few years ago.
But today we turn our attention to the findings about dads. The same study found fathers are increasingly concerned about their kids and they worry they're not doing a good job as a parent.
From the study:
"For their part, fathers now spend more time engaged in housework and child care than they did half a century ago. And the amount of time they devote to paid work has decreased slightly over that period. Fathers have by no means caught up to mothers in terms of time spent caring for children and doing household chores, but there has been some gender convergence in the way they divide their time between work and home."
In addition, 46 percent of fathers say they are not spending enough time with their children, compared with 23 percent of mothers.
Here with his thoughts on modern fatherhood is Jeremy Adam Smith, an occasional stay-at-home dad and author of the 2009 book, "The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the Twenty-First-Century Family."
Tennis tournaments owners fear Ellison spending too much on Indian Wells
Larry Ellison is the fifth richest man in the world. And he hasn’t been shy about spending his money.
Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, bought a 5-story high yacht, his own Hawaiian island, and a tennis tournament that’s going on right now near Palm Springs. At first, the tennis world saw Ellison (and his bank account) as a huge boon. The Indian Wells tournament was on the verge of moving to Doha or Shanghai, joining the long list of American tournaments that have gone overseas.
Ellison bought the tournament and the 54-acre facility where its played in 2008. Since then, the BNP Paribas Open has become so popular it’s now known as the “Fifth Grand Slam,” and attracts close to 400,000 fans. Players like Rafael Nadal lavish praise on the tournament -- and Ellison.
“It means a lot for me, and especially for tennis, to have somebody like Larry who is supporting our sport,” Nadal said this week. “The players can say thank you for all his support.”
But other tournament owners are complaining. Turns out the billionaire has been spending too much for their taste. Last year, Ellison sought to give players a $1.6 million dollar bump in prize money.
The Women’s Tennis Association quickly approved the increase. But the men’s tour – the Association of Tennis Professionals – didn’t. The board, made up of half players and half owners, deadlocked. Players, like Britain’s Andy Murray, were stunned that an organization that's supposed to represent them would allow money to be left on the table.
“Obviously everyone was disappointed with the decision," Murray said. “My opinion is that if a tournament wants to increase its prize money, it should be allowed to. I don't see why we should be blocking that.”
After months of delay, the head of the ATP cast the tie-breaking vote, approving the prize increase before the start of the tournament. That was despite opposition from other owners who look at Ellison’s seemingly unlimited bank account with a mix of envy and fear.
“No one can stop Larry Ellison,” said Neil Harman, who writes about tennis for The Times of London. “It makes people very nervous.”
His event just announced a $70-million dollar expansion that includes building a second stadium, with a Nobu sushi restaurant courtside.
“In these times of austerity there isn’t the money there, so they’re saying ‘We’re going to be in trouble if we’re trying to live up to what Indian Wells is doing. We can’t afford it,' " Harman said.
But the CEO of Indian Wells’ tournament, Raymond Moore, says other events are just being stingy.
“I can name eight other tournaments off the top off my head who have the financial ability to increase the prize money if they wanted to,” he said. “They just choose not to.”
But at the end of the day, it's still a business, he said.
“He didn’t get to be the fifth-richest man in the world by just throwing money out the window, Moore said. “These are calculated business decisions.”
Moore said they increased prize money as a defensive measure. There had been rumblings from players who wanted to shorten Indian Wells so they could play more tournaments, and pick up more paychecks.
“We’ve changed that conversation," said Moore. “The conversation is no longer about Indian Wells reducing the number of days. It’s ‘Why aren’t all the other tournaments like Indian Wells?’”
Exactly the conversation other tournaments feared. Both the men’s and women’s winner of this weekend’s final will take home a million dollars.
Ellison is considering making next year’s purse even bigger.