Homeland Security union says immigration bill will weaken public safety; UC hospital employees plan to strike over pension changes, pay; African clawed frogs spreading deadly fungus in California; Riding along with the port pilots of Los Angeles; Election Eve: What you need to know before heading to the polls; LA Kitchen aims to curb food waste, plus much more.
Election Eve: What you need to know before heading to the polls
Tomorrow, Los Angeles will head to the polls to elect a new mayor, a few city councilmembers, and make some calls on medical marijuana. If you haven't been paying attention these last few months, it's not too late.
RELATED: Check out the KPCC voter guide before heading to the polls
KPCC's political reporters Alice Walton and Frank Stoltze are here with a lighting round of everything you need to know before you head to the ballot box tomorrow.
Immigration reform proposal encourages Canadians to retire in the US
Lets call it the snowbird provision. Buried in more than 800 pages of the immigration reform legislation currently under debate, is a proposal that would allow Canadians to visit second homes in the US for up to eight months a year.
It's one of two proposals in the bill aimed at boosting foreign retirements here. From the Fronteras Desk in Phoenix, Jude Joffe-Block reports.
High school senior balances courage with fears of being undocumented
Comprehensive immigration reform is moving forward in Washington. Last week, a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives reached agreement on how to address key issues like a path to citizenship.
No one has more riding on the outcome than the estimated 11-million undocumented immigrants living in the US. Many of them are young students anxious about their futures.
The California Report's Jasmin Lopez brings us the story of Marco Perez, a high school senior struggling to balance his courage and fears.
This story was produced in collaboration with the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Predicting how Congress will vote on immigration reform
During the last presidential election, traditional pollsters were challenged by a relatively new breed of election gurus who used mathematical models to predict the outcome. For the most part, these "modelers" did a better job of divining how people would cast their vote than did big name firms like Gallup.
Tom K. Wong, a political scientist at UC San Diego, is using the technique to predict how members of Congress will vote on the immigration bill.
Homeland Security union says immigration bill will weaken public safety
Today a group of Dept. of Homeland Security employees hopes to tip the odds against the passage of the Senate's immigration legislation. Two labor unions are issuing a letter which expresses scathing criticism of the Gang of Eight's plan. They say the legislation as written would be perilous to public safety.
For more on this move and who's behind it, we're joined now by Julia Preston of the New York Times.
On The Lot: WikiLeaks doc, Cannes Film Festival and more
Films about a Dylanesque folk singer, and a group of pop culture crazed teen criminals are making a big splash in Cannes at the annual film festival.
Just some of what we'll talk about in On The Lot, our weekly check-in on entertainment news, with Rebecca Keegan of the LA Times.
LA Kitchen aims to curb food waste
Food waste is a huge problem in this country. On average, Americans waste about 40 percent of the food we produce, including the produce supermarkets throw out for cosmetic reasons.
All this tossing is tonight's topic at the Crawford Family Forum, a discussion called "Getting Wasted: LA's Food Excess."
One of the event's panelists, Robert Egger, is former head of DC Central Kitchen, a community kitchen that recycles unserved food. He's about to open a new venture called LA Kitchen.
UC hospital employees plan to strike over pension changes, pay
This week, patient care workers at five University of California medical centers, including UCLA and UC Irvine, plan to go on strike. But just how many depends on a decision which will be made today in Sacramento County Superior Court.
KPCC's health reporter Stephanie O'Neill joins the show to explain.
Riding along with the port pilots of Los Angeles (Photos)
Nearly everything imported from Asia has to get here somehow, from the iPhone in your hand, to the car you're driving, to the socks on your feet. Often the first US stop in that journey is the Port of Los Angeles.
More than 2,200 ships docked here last year, bringing in over $280 billion in cargo. At the port, you'll find one of the highest-paid LA city employees: port pilots. There are about a dozen port pilots in LA, and on average they earn around $320,000 annually.
Los Angeles is also the only place where these pilots are city workers.; elsewhere, they're usually subcontracted through private companies.
We wanted to know what they do to earn that paycheck, so we hopped aboard a boat carrying pilot Brett McDaniel. He was en route several miles out to sea to greet the incoming container ship the Hyundai Faith.
It was on the last leg on its month-long journey across the Pacific from South Korea, and McDaniel is there to help navigate it in.
LA port pilots must know from memory the entire 6,000-acre complex of the port. McDaniel uses that knowledge as well as his maritime experience to nudge this massive ship into the dock.
Once he boards the ship, he'll talk with the ship's captain and crew about the weather conditions, what the ship is capable, and more in order to assess how to safely bring it in. It's a delicate job, as one wrong move can cost millions of dollars. Sometimes it takes hours to move large ships into the port.
Once it docks, its cargo can be unloaded onto trains and semis bound for the rest of the country -- port pilots are an important link in global trade.
But for Brett McDaniel, continuing his decades-long career being at sea and meeting new people is enough. "I don't care what they pay because I'd be doing it anyway," he said. "But I'm happy to know I'm one of the highest-paid. I just hope my boss doesn't find out."
South African Clawed Frogs spreading deadly fungus in California
A species of frogs once used to test for signs of human life is now contributing to the spread of a fatal disease among a wide variety of California wildlife.
In the late 1920s, long before modern-day pregnancy tests were developed, the South African Clawed Frog was used to help doctors test for pregnancy. It was discovered that if you injected the frog with the urine of a pregnant women, the frog would ovulate and lay eggs.
RELATED: An animal once used as a pregnancy test may be 'the Typhoid Mary of the frog world'
The frogs were used widely in hospitals from the early 1930s through to the 70s. However, when labs using these frogs finally shut down, well-meaning hospital workers released the frogs into the wild, likely unaware of the impact they'd have on native species here in California.
"At that time, we didn't quite have the conservationist approach to things and the awareness of the kind of impact that this non-native species might have when introduced into geographic locations that had never seen them before," said Professor and Veterinarian Sherril Green from Stanford University's School of Medicine.
Scientists have now found that the South African Clawed Frog carries a fungus that in endemic to the species and difficult to detect, since the from shows no signs of sickness. The fungus is adding to one of the biggest losses of biodiversity ever seen, according to researchers at Stanford and San Francisco State University.
"It takes 10-20 years or at least that long before you can actually tell the impact of introducing a new species into a new area," said Green. "We're seeing this now, but the frogs have been here 50 years or so. I think that what we're seeing now is probably something that was introduced that long ago."
The fungus affects other aquatic amphibians, as it's passed through the water, by wind or on the feathers of birds. The fungal spores colonize the porous skin of other amphibians, causing the skin to thicken and making it difficult for them to regulate their electrolytes and body water. The affected animal ultimately die.
"We've had a number of species in California that were already threatened by loss of habitat and pollutants and other things that now have this added stresser of being exposed to this fungus," said Green. "Their populations have been decimated. For example, the Red-Legged and the Yellow-Legged Frog in the Sierra Nevada were endangered for years, and right now, it's very hard to find those frogs at all. We fear they are extinct."
Green estimates that we've lost about 200-400 different species of frogs in the last decade, in part due to the spread of the fungus. Curbing the effects of the fungus isn't easy, because there's no vaccine and the South African Clawed Frog has been living and breeding in the wild for decades. Scientists now hope future generations of frogs will develop their own resistance to the fungus.
"The ones that are exposed to it that don't die will, hopefully, survive and go on to produce generations of frogs that can learn to live with this. It's a tough situation; it's not something we're going to be able to stop," said Green. "I think more rules and regulations probably aren't going to do much at this point, but the heightened awareness the public has about the impact of releasing anything that isn't native to the area — frogs and other species, plants and animals of all kinds — can be significant, although you won't see it immediately."
LA's next mayor must make choices on water, transit, toxic hotspots
Throughout the LA mayoral election, we've carried out a project called "Dear Mayor." We've been asking voters about the issues they want the city's next leader to address. One of them is the environment.
As KPCC's Molly Peterson reports, the winner of Tuesday's election will need to tackle several environmental issues.
Mark Bittman on eating 'Vegan Before 6' for better health
Summer is coming up quick and many people are looking for a way to shed some of those extra pounds. How does this sound for a way to lose weight: eat whatever you want. Meat? Sure. Cheese? Go for it. Heck, even throw in a slice of cake now and again. Just be sure to do so after 6 pm.
That's the premise of a new book called "VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good" by New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman. He joins the show to tell us why he decided to go vegan part-time and he offers some tips on how to eat vegan on a budget.
Interview Highlights:
On what caused him to take up a vegan diet:
"About the time I turned 57, I went to my doctor and he said that I was 40 pounds overweight, my cholesterol was 50 points higher than he'd like to see it, my blood sugar was high, I had sleep apnea and so on. He started rattling off different drugs and surgeries that could take care of these things, but I went to see an older guy who I liked very much. He happened to be my first daughter's pediatrician. He took one look at all of this stuff and said that I should just become a vegan. I thought about this, and from everything that I'd known, and that we know now is that humanity is moving as a race towards a more plant-based diet. We need to move away from processed food and animal products; science is pretty much unanimous on that fact.
"So I took his advice and did what I could with it and I created this pretty simple diet, which is basically eating unprocessed plants, fruits and vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds until 6 o'clock at night. Then, I go do whatever I want to do. I eat a normal dinner, and start again the next day. It worked. Within 12 weeks, I had lost 35 pounds, my cholesterol was down 50 points, my sleep apnea went away and I felt better. But it wasn't until three or four years later that realized that I had been doing this a long time, and it was sustainable. That's when I decided to write 'VB6'."
On why he decided on 6pm:
"Well, it could be five, it could be seven, it doesn't matter. The point is that you eat this highly principled, pretty strict diet until dinner. And then you eat a normal dinner. I mean, a blowout dinner is fine, too, but not every night. There's an implication that you eat dinner and if you want dessert, that's fine too. But then, you don't go eat a bag of chips and a pint of ice cream at 9 o'clock. You're not going to lose weight that way."
On studies that show eating more in the evening causes weight gain:
"There are studies that show that, although they're not conclusive. In the world of diet and nutrition, what's conclusive is what I said before: we need to move towards more plants. What I wanted to do was create a diet, not in the sense of 'lose 21 pounds in 21 days,' but in the sense of 'this is the way I eat now.' Period. There's no time limit, there's no date, this is the way I eat. And if I said, 'Ok, there are some studies that show it's best not to have our biggest meal at night,' then what do you do at night? The fact is that we are social. We go out with friends at night, we cook for friends at night, we eat with our family at night, many of us have a couple of drinks at night. All these things, I think, outweigh the possible downsides of eating your biggest meal late in the day. I think the ability to maintain this diet is the most important thing."
On the cost of doing VB6 on a restricted budget:
"I take some issue with that, saying fruits and vegetables aren't cheap. I missed breakfast this morning, so I stopped at the fruit stand outside of my work, which is far from the cheapest fruit stand around, and I bought three bananas and about a pound of grapes and three apricots for three bucks. That's my breakfast and my afternoon snack; that's not a lot of money. I recognize that, to some people, that does sound like a lot of money, but if you're going to buy a sausage biscuit and a coffee it's going to cost you three bucks also.
On something vegan you can make for breakfast:
"I like oatmeal with chopped vegetables and cilantro and scallions and soy sauce. I realize that's not to everyone's taste, but many people like savory breakfast. Smoothies, which I make with frozen fruit and silken tofu or soy milk or almond milk or oat milk or whatever. And fruit, I just eat it through the morning and it seems to do fine."
On his favorite places to eat while on the VB6 plan:
"I love your farmers' markets. Only a crazy person wouldn't. And since you're on the east side, I used to love to go up to this place called "Sunland Produce" which is like a crazy Central Valley dropping-off point for incredibly cheap fruits and vegetables. Industrially produced for sure, but an amazing cornucopia."
Excerpt from VB6 by Mark Bittman by TheRecipeClub
Hola Mexico event highlights burgeoning Tijuana food scene
An event called the Greatest Barbecue took place downtown yesterday. It brought together some of Mexico's foremost chefs to grill up a whole lotta meat. The event was part of the Hola Mexico Film Festival, which has expanded this year to include a music and — thankfully — a food program.
Our producer Meghan McCarty was there and she's here to tell us more.