San Diego News Fix

Two facilities at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar have been readied to house hundreds of Americans returning from China due to the coronavirus outbreak, the Marine Corps said Tuesday. Dr. Christopher Braden, a deputy director with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control deployed to handle repatriation flights from China to California, said the arrival is imminent. Late Tuesday, U.S. Northern Command said on Twitter that two U.S. State Department flights had left China bound for Travis Air Force Base near Vacaville. One plane will refuel and continue on to Miramar. Passengers on the other will be housed in quarantine at Travis.

Much remains unknown about elephants, too — witness the death in December at the zoo of 48-year-old Tembo. A “sudden change” in the African pachyderm’s condition prompted keepers to euthanize her, according to zoo officials. They said she’d been under veterinary care for age-related ailments for a while. Results of a necropsy are pending. Her death came four weeks after another African elephant, M’Dunda, collapsed and died at the Oakland Zoo. She was 50 and had shown “no signs of existing medical issues, albeit her advanced age,” the zoo said. A necropsy is under way there, too. Elephants also die in the wild, of course, and often violently. But their passing in zoos raises thorny questions about what is gained by keeping them captive.

Fabric stores that sell threads, buttons and materials for making clothes are dwindling in San Diego, with owners shuttering their shops citing waning interest from customers. The disappearance of fabric stores is probably not a shock to outsiders — in the age of fast fashion, who still makes their own clothes? But sewing garments at home is — surprisingly — not dead. While fabric stores of yesteryear are falling off the map, a new industry is rising up to meet the modern demands of young “sewists” — a relatively new term that describes anyone who sews. And these businesses look quite different than your grandma’s fabric shop.

San Diego resident Yanjun Wei traveled with her two small children to the city of Wuhan to celebrate the Chinese New Year with her parents. Now the family is holed up in a high-rise apartment building in the megalopolis, believed to be ground zero of the deadly coronavirus outbreak that’s killed more than 200 people and sickened thousands. Over the last week, the Chinese government has put the urban area’s 11 million people under an unprecedented quarantine. Commercial flights, public transportation and even major roads have been shut down, leaving the usually bustling city eerily quiet, according to numerous accounts. “I’m trying not to be emotional here,” said the 37-year-old Wei, tearing up during a video interview with the Union-Tribune using the social-media app WeChat.

Authorities announced Wednesday the discovery of the longest, most sophisticated cross-border drug tunnel in history stretching nearly one mile from the Tijuana airport into the U.S. U.S. Border Patrol agents described the tunnel as the “most sophisticated they had seen” with an extensive rail and cart system to rapidly transport drugs, forced air ventilation, and high-voltage electrical cables and panels. The tunnel, named “Baja Metro” by border agents, also had an elevator at its entrance and a complex drainage system. The drug tunnel’s discovery was the culmination of a “challenging” multi-year, multi-agency investigation led by a coalition of U.S. law enforcement officers, according to Border Patrol.

Amid pushback following the revelation that there are data-gathering sensors on thousands of local high-tech street lights, a San Diego city committee will get its first look at a potential policy governing how all that data is accessed and used. On Wednesday, the proposed policy will be discussed by San Diego’s Public Safety & Livable Neighborhoods committee. It’s the first step to putting the policy in front of the City Council. The policy, if ultimately OK’d, will mark the first time the city codifies how the data is used and who gets to view surveillance footage the sensors gather. In a written report to the committee, Cody Hooven of the city’s Sustainability Department said the policy will “create guidelines for the data generated by the City’s streetlight sensors.” That, she said, includes “proper use, access and dissemination” of the data.

A retired Navy SEAL whose war crimes trial made international news has launched a video attack on former SEAL teammates who accused him of murder, shooting civilians and who testified against him at his San Diego court-martial in June. In a three-minute video posted to his Facebook page and Instagram account Monday, retired Chief Special Operator Edward Gallagher, 40, referred to some members of his former platoon as “cowards” and highlighted names, photos and — for those still on active duty — their duty status and current units, something former SEALs say places those men — and the Navy’s mission — in jeopardy. Gallagher was accused of several war crimes by some of his platoon subordinates, including that he shot civilians and stabbed a wounded ISIS fighter in the neck, killing him, while in Iraq in 2017. He pleaded not guilty and was acquitted of most charges, but was convicted of posing for a photo with an Isis fighter’s corpse, a crime for which the jury reduced his rank.

San Diego life sciences executive Jeff Hawkins is trying to bring credibility back to field rocked by scandal. A former Illumina vice president, Hawkins heads startup Truvian Sciences. The 5-year-old company is developing a compact blood testing machine that promises to deliver 40 standard health and wellness screening results in about 20 minutes, compared with up to a week turnaround time for similar tests processed at centralized labs. The desktop device, which targets retail health clinics such as those popping up in Walmart and CVS, medical offices and corporate wellness centers, also requires less blood than is commonly drawn for tests sent to large labs. And Truvian expects prices to be significantly lower as well. The company’s technology is still in development. While experts say Truvian is well prepared to meet accuracy and precision targets on its machines, it hasn’t proven its devices work yet.

Seven years after the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station officially went offline, the eight-year process of physically dismantling the plant and knocking down the domes that have loomed over the landscape of Camp Pendleton for four decades is about to begin. The plant’s operator, Southern California Edison, has mailed notices to about 12,000 residents in a five-mile radius of the plant that initial work will start no earlier than Feb. 22. The first jobs include erecting staging areas and temporary trailers in the plant’s parking lots and removing materials containing asbestos in the Units 2 and 3 domes. By the time work is complete, all that will remain will be two dry storage facilities housing canisters of used-up nuclear fuel from the days when the plant still produced electricity, a security building with personnel to look over the waste enclosed in casks, a seawall 28 to 30 feet high, a walkway connecting two beaches north and south of the plant and a switch-yard with power lines.

The March Primary is just weeks away, and the race to fill the seat vacated by former congressman Duncan Hunter is starting to heat up. This week, Darrell Issa released a campaign ad attacking Carl DeMaio for previous statements made about President Donald Trump -- it also featured newspaper clippings mentioning DeMaio’s sexual orientation. The reaction to the ads was negative among San Diego area-electeds, but in one of the most conservative parts of California -- it’s unclear how attacks like this pan out.

A 62-year-old welder convicted in the bludgeoning deaths of a Fallbrook family of four, including two young children, was sentenced Tuesday to the death penalty. Moments before learning his fate, Charles “Chase” Merritt, 62, tearfully told the judge he was innocent in the 2010 killings of business associate Joseph McStay, 40, wife Summer McStay, 43, and the couple’s two preschool sons, Gianni, 4 and Joey Jr., 3. “I don’t deserve this,” Merritt said. “I did not do this. As God as my witness, I will be back here and prove to everyone that that is true.” The sentence was handed down by San Bernardino Superior Court Judge Michael Smith, who last year presided over Merritt’s trial. The jury convicted Merritt of four counts of murder. On Tuesday, Smith said the verdict was “supported by substantial evidence.”

The city of San Diego waited nearly two months to plan and announce emergency construction on a La Jolla cave that geologists said could collapse at any time, city records show. City officials announced in August their plans for emergency construction to reinforce Koch’s Cave and the roadway above it — Coast Boulevard. According to the city’s statement, issued Aug. 9, geology experts had discovered a weak zone in the La Jolla sea cave and recommended that immediate action be taken. “With public safety as the top priority, the city of San Diego today will begin an emergency construction project to stabilize a cliff area and roadway in La Jolla following an analysis by geology experts,” the news release said. City officials hosted a news conference at the site and invited the media to attend.

Laramie Logan answered the door at her Coronado home one afternoon in early December to be greeted by a chaplain with the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office. “He told me the devastating news that my brother was hit by a car and didn’t make it,” said the 40-year-old mother of three. “I just dropped to my knees and cried.” Her brother, David Henry Hill, was one of 24 pedestrians killed in traffic-related accidents in the city of San Diego last year — compared to 25 in 2016 after the city first pledged to eliminate such fatalities as part of the nationwide Vision Zero campaign. Lt. Cmdr. David Henry Hill, 37, was killed crossing India Street near West Olive Street and an off-ramp from north I-5 in Bankers Hill on Dec. 2, 2019.(Courtesy of Laramie Logan) The city has invested in a number of safety improvements in recent years, overhauling dozens of streets and crosswalks at crash-prone intersections, as well as launching a public awareness campaign. Those efforts appear to be paying off to a certain degre

There might be fewer construction cranes downtown, but that doesn’t mean the region’s apartment frenzy has halted. Much of 2020’s apartment construction will be in neighborhoods outside of downtown San Diego, which has made up the lion’s share of new rentals the past few years. More building is now occurring in North Park, Hillcrest, Pacific Beach and throughout the county. There are around 3,500 new apartments planned to open in 2020. That’s down from 4,500 expected at the start of last year, but early numbers show that total was likely not reached. Predicting how many apartments will open at the start of the year can be tricky because delays are frequent and one large project being postponed a few months can skew a yearly total.

Solving San Diego’s housing crisis with less neighborhood backlash, partnering with the county on new homelessness efforts and reforming state law to keep drug addicts off the street are some of Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s top priorities for 2020. Faulconer used his sixth and final State of the City address on Wednesday to lay out those goals and several others for his last year, which he said would be “a year of action” before he’s forced to leave office by term limits. The mayor also reflected on his six years in office during the half-hour speech, declaring that he’s helped write a “comeback story” by making San Diego a national leader instead of a scandal-ridden city with crumbling infrastructure. “San Diego is back,” said Faulconer to several hundred spectators gathered in downtown’s Balboa Theatre. “It is recovered, reformed and revitalized. Now, San Diego is leading.”

Sexual issues lead to many divorces, including the threatened split in the United Methodist Church. Divided on same-sex marriage and the status of LGBTQ believers, the nation's third largest Christian denomination — after Catholicism and the Southern Baptist Convention — may soon break up. "No one celebrates separation. I certainly do not," said the Rev. Jonathan Park, associate pastor of the Korean United Methodist Church of San Diego, a traditionalist congregation. "But I believe it is inevitable." The Rev. Bob Rhodes, whose leadership of the progressive Pacific Beach United Methodist Church has not prevented a close friendship with Park, agreed. For years, he had hoped the church's feuding wings could co-exist. "Then a friend asked if I were counseling a couple where one was abusing the other, would I counsel them to stay together?" Rhodes said. "I think both sides feel they have been abused by the other."

Four cities in San Diego County have launched a last-ditch effort to lower the number of new housing units they are expected to build over the next eight years through a controversial state-mandated program. If the current numbers hold up, two of those cities, Coronado and Solana Beach, fear they’ll be forced to rezone neighborhoods to make room for high-density developments. The other two cities, Lemon Grove and Imperial Beach, argue that the current housing allocation numbers perpetuate inequality by requiring cities that already have the highest concentration of low-income housing to build even more. The controversial state program is officially known as the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, or RHNA. It started in the 1960s to require cities to plan to meet the housing needs of residents. Every eight years, state officials come up with the number of housing units needed to keep up with population trends and ask regional authorities to distribute that number among individual cities.

On the same day that former Rep. Duncan D. Hunter officially resigned from his seat representing the 50th Congressional District, a new poll of likely voters shows the race to succeed him has tightened in his absence. In the poll Democrat Ammar Campa-Najjar, with 26 percent of the vote, is leading a crowded field that has drawn ten candidates. He is closely followed by GOP opponents Darrell Issa (21 percent), Carl DeMaio (20 percent) and Brian Jones (12 percent). Fifteen percent of the likely voters surveyed were undecided.

Airport Authority approves plans to add 11 gates to Terminal 1, plus a new taxiway and access road that will remove 45,000 cars a day from Harbor Drive

San Diego State coach, Rocky Long, guided SDSU to nine straight bowl appearances and compiled 81-38 record with the Aztecs. Brady Hoke will be returning as the Aztecs head coach. Hoke was previously in charge of the program in 2009-10.