Orange County supervisors challenge feds on CA sanctuary laws, California runs emergency drills as part of Tsunami Preparedness Week, the Pacific Food and Beverage Museum opens in San Pedro.
Orange County has become the epicenter of the resistance against California
Orange County is becoming the epicenter of a growing battle. Following a vote in Los Alamitos last week to approve an ordinance exempting one of the O.C.'s smallest cities from the state's sanctuary status, a handful of other cities have voiced their support.
"There's been some momentum in Orange County ever since Los Alamitos," said Los Angeles Times immigration reporter, Cindy Carcamo, who has been covering the story.
Yorba Linda, Buena Park, Huntington Beach and Mission Viejo have joined the resistance in some capacity. Now, the Orange County Board of Supervisors has voted to join a federal lawsuit to fight the state's sanctuary laws.
How can small cities afford to go up against the state?
Many of these moves by cities or municipalities have been symbolic, but others are a call for battle.
"The legal scholars that I've spoken with have said that there is going to be a legal fight," Carcamo said, "especially when it comes to Los Alamitos because Los Alamitos is blatantly exempting itself from California law."
The Los Alamitos approach? Starting a "GoFundMe" page as a preemptive move for any legal fights that may crop up. The page reads, "Please contribute to our GoFund Me Page for the City's legal defense. The funds will go directly to the City to pay for our legal costs." So far, just over $4,000 has been raised.
As the story develops, here are some things to keep an eye on:
- This is just the beginning—Los Alamitos sparked it all about a week ago, and Orange County has since followed suit. More cities and municipalities within the county are expected to join in the near future.
- Orange County is changing, but don't expect it to happen too quickly—Even though the county voted Democrat for the first time since the depression, "It's going to take awhile for it to go blue. It's more of a violet right now." And that's because...
- ...the county is still red at its core—"It's traditionally been a red county. It gave birth to proposition 187. It's been stridently anti-illegal immigration for some time."' Change won't come quickly.
This SoCal team may be the 'sleeper-pick' to win the playoffs
"Hope springs eternal."
Baseball fans might have that saying in their heads a lot this time of year because spring means the start of a new season, which begins Thursday.
Opening day: every team is tied for first place, no team is in last, and hope is at its height — especially here in LA with the Angels and Dodgers.
Andy Kamenetzky says the Angels have a lot of reasons to be hopeful:
I think the Angels should be better this season. Centerfielder Mike Trout is arguably the best player in baseball — he's a six-time all-star, two-time MVP. He has not finished lower than 4th since entering the league in 2012.
They have a really good defensive shortstop in Andrelton Simmons, a really good starting pitcher in Garrett Richards, who, if he's healthy, is one of the best in the league.
They've made moves to improve, they added second-baseman Ian Kinsler and third-baseman Zack Cozart, Justin Upton, who was acquired at the tail-end of last season will have a full year in Anaheim.
They were already really good defensively, so they should be even better this year. They're considered a kind of sleeper-pick to win the playoffs.
Are you prepared ... for a tsunami?
Think of a disaster striking California and most of us think earthquakes. But there's more than 34,000 miles of coastline. If you didn't know the state is just as vulnerable to tsunamis, well, now you do. This week is California Tsunami Preparedness Week, and today the state's Office of Emergency Services will run a test of our emergency response system. Tsunami Program Officer Kevin Miller explained the risk.
The most likely causes of tsunamis in California
A tsunami is in most cases caused by a large earthquake under the ocean. It's not necessarily the type of earthquakes we have directly in California. Our tsunamis come from far away, from areas where we have subduction zone earthquakes which will move the ocean floor. Places like off the Aleutian Islands in Alaska and Japan and off of South America and Chile.
Tsunamis travel as fast as a jet
Generally, they travel about 500 mph in the open ocean, about as fast as a jet. They slow down to 30 to 40 mph once they reach the coast. From Alaska, it would take about five hours to reach Southern California from Japan. We had an event in 2011 that impacted our coast, and it took nine to ten hours to reach us.
Should Southern Californians worry
It sounds like we have a lot of time to react, but we have hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions of people at the coast. Think of a 4th of July weekend and the amount of time it takes to leave the beach on a day like that. That's the kind of thing that keeps emergency managers up at night.
The history of tsunami strikes in California
They are potentially high consequence but low probability events. We've had six in the last nine years that have raised alert levels. They typically are not something that causes inundation and damage. In 2011, the Japan earthquake and tsunami caused up to $100 million in damage to coastal facilities in California and that one still did not cause inundation of dry land. In 1964, one of the biggest earthquakes in history in Alaska sent a tsunami to Crescent City and killed 11 people in that city.
How to protect yourself from a tsunami
Walking away from the coast to high ground. That's basically all you need to do to protect yourself.
A ‘who's who’ of people vying to fill Charlie Beck's LAPD chief seat
In a surprise announcement early this year, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck announced his early retirement.
And with no interim chief on-deck, that means the Los Angeles Police Commission only has five months to find Beck’s replacement.
The L.A. Times reported Tuesday that 31 applications were submitted for the position.
While those names may never be revealed, there are some interesting possibilities ahead for the department, like appointing a woman or Latino to the job for the first time.
Frank Stoltze is KPCC ‘s criminal justice and public safety correspondent. He sheds some light on what the Police Commission and L.A. residents are looking for in the next chief.
Craving some history? The Pacific Food and Beverage Museum now has a permanent home
The Pacific Food and Beverage Museum has been a wandering attraction since 2013, offering culinary talks, mixology seminars and curated dinners across SoCal.
Its mission is to reflect the diverse culinary culture of the Southland and beyond. Encouraging Californians to live a little with their palette.
Philip Dobard is president of the Pacific Food and Beverage Museum, which opened its permanent gallery over the weekend in San Pedro, just a few blocks from the port of Los Angeles. It's a place to see and experience the way people used to eat and drink, like the museum’s previous talk on coffee history in SoCal, or its Victorian-era menu collection. Turtle soup anyone?
Dobard: San Pedro has a rich cultural history, a rich culinary history. Waves of Italian immigrants, Croatian immigrants, Japanese immigrants, you name it. They have come through Los Angeles, and many of them, for generations, through San Pedro.
And those newcomers may have enjoyed mountains of meatballs, sips of sake or goulash, both today and when they arrived. Keeping those roots alive is what the museum is all about.
The Pacific Food and Beverage Museum is part of the National Food and Beverage Foundation or NatFAB, for short. That’s a nonprofit dedicated to the understanding of food and its related culture. Dobard is also the foundation’s vice president.
"Los Angeles is a handful of global cities where you can experience virtually any ethnic cuisine, that you can experience both unadulterated and hybridized," Dobard said.
Exploring different cultural food is part of the museum’s mission. Like their recent tasting of “explosive” Thai bites with Southeast Asian Cuisine Chef, Robert Danhi.
There’s regional cuisine too. Get a taste next month with a cooking workshop on the artichoke. That’s California’s state vegetable, in case you didn’t know.
To wash it down, the Museum of the American Cocktail will also make an L.A. appearance at the San Pedro museum with swizzle sticks, cocktail napkins and other cocktail memorabilia dating back as far as the 18th century.
For the Victorian exhibit, one restaurant memento has a drawing of a woman with “Ladies Day,” written at the top. During the late 19th century, dining events for women were reserved for special occasions, according to the museum’s director, Tracy Mitchell.
Mitchell: It was not typical for a woman to dine out in a fine restaurant. Most of that was done by men and they were busy networking and smoking cigars. But it really wasn’t until the 1920s when women regularly appeared in restaurants.
Now, of course, women are commonplace and not just in the dining room. And both male and female chefs tend to love ink, which is the subject of the Shakers, Knives and Irons exhibit from photographer, Romney Caruso. Making its appearance at the Pacific Food and Beverage Museum, the exhibit shows off the tattoos of people who work in New Orleans' kitchens and bars.
One of Dobard's favorites is a photo of Top Chef alum, Isaac Toups.
In the photo, Toups stands with his bare back to the camera, donning a large alligator tattoo, and opening two doors to a cloud of steam.
"For all we know, he might be smoking alligator." Dobard said.
The photos won’t stop with New Orleans. L.A. chefs and bartenders are next and will be displayed as part of an upcoming museum exhibit.
Even for those who don’t consider themselves “foodies,” Dobard hopes the gallery will help visitors think outside the box when it comes to food culture.
"We want to provoke them to think more deeply and more critically, not just about what they eat and drink, but what we as a people consume in order live, not just to live but to flourish."