San Diego News Fix

About 15 community activists and religious leaders gathered in front of Balboa Park’s Natural History Museum Wednesday to ask Congress to step in and limit President Donald Trump’s authority to wage war on Iran after a week of violence between the two countries. The speakers say they represent a coalition of groups seeking peace and an end to escalating violence that peaked with the Jan. 2 U.S. assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. On Tuesday night, Iran struck back , launching at least 15 ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq in what experts said was an attack designed to avoidcasualties. In comments Wednesday morning from the White House, Trump said the U.S. would respond to those strikes with sanctions, not more military action, saying “Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world.”

Rep. Duncan Hunter, the Republican from Alpine who on Dec. 3 pleaded guilty to a felony involving campaign spending, said he will officially resign this coming Monday. He notified House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Governor Gavin Newsom in a letter Tuesday that he will resign on Jan. 13, nearly six weeks after his guilty plea. “It has been an honor to serve the people of California’s 50th District, and I greatly appreciate the trust they have put in me over these last 11 years,” Hunter wrote. Hunter, who was elected to office in 2008, was indicted in August of 2018 on 60 federal counts based on accusations he and his wife and former campaign manager, Margaret Hunter, stole $250,000 of campaign funds, using it for family vacations, groceries, his extramarital affairs and other non-campaign uses, including airfare for a pet rabbit.

A long-envisioned Purple Line trolley remains in limbo as transit officials work through the details over how and whether to build the rail connection between downtown Chula Vista and the city of San Diego’s Kearny Mesa neighborhood. The San Diego Metropolitan Transit System now appears to be leaning away from paying for the line as part of a roughly $24 billion tax measure slated to go before voters later this year. However, the San Diego Association of Governments has signaled an eagerness to incorporate the route’s alignment into plans for a regional high-speed rail system. For months, control over the future of the region’s rail system has stoked tension between MTS and SANDAG, the region’s primary transportation and planning agency.

Nearly two dozen women won $12.7 million in a fraud lawsuit against the owners and operators of a San Diego-based pornographic website, GirlsDoPorn, a Superior Court judge ruled Thursday. Website owners Michael James Pratt, 36, and Matthew Isaac Wolfe, 37, and porn actor Ruben Andre Garcia, 31, were sued by 22 women who claimed they were deceived and coerced into making explicit sex films without knowing the images would be posted on the Internet. San Diego Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright, who presided over a four-month-long bench trial, issued his decision in favor of all 22 plaintiffs and against a total of 13 defendants. Enright found that the individuals and various affiliated businesses had operated as a single business entity and therefore all were liable.

ourtroom 2A looks unlike any other in the San Diego federal courthouse. In the courtroom designated to handle the flow of migrants being criminally prosecuted under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, a towering plexiglass divider has been erected separating the misdemeanor defendants from their attorneys and the rest of the court. The U.S. Marshals Service says the barrier is a security measure “to ensure the safety of staff, prisoners, and members of the public who attend court hearings,” while defense attorneys see the divider as a larger symbol in the clash over immigration policy. “It’s using a nonexistent problem as an excuse to build yet another wall,” said Kathryn Nester, executive director of Federal Defenders of San Diego, which provides public defender services.

As car buffs ring in the new year with the 2020 edition of the San Diego International Auto Show with the latest makes and models, the auto industry seems to be going in multiple directions at the same time: sales of sports utility vehicles and trucks continue to surge, electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids in California are trending up but so is the average price of a new vehicle. "If someone told me, 'I want to be buy a car and I want to keep it for 20 years,' it's kind of difficult to answer because I don't know that we have any idea of what a car is going to look like or how it's going to perform in 20 years," said Richard Newendyke, the auto show's chairman and executive manager at Kearney Mesa Infiniti. "Automobiles are still a very personal selection." For years, sedans have dominated the California auto market. "Cars are king," was a longstanding motto among Golden State dealers but in recent years, SUVs and pickup truck (designated as light trucks in the industry) have

Christmas came early to San Diego this year. Back in January, we made our first visits to the recently opened restaurants Jeune et Jolie in Carlsbad and Fort Oak in Mission Hills. Simply put, we were blown away. And it was apparent, just weeks into 2019, that the region was about to experience a bar-raising, watershed year for dining. And the gastronomic gift kept giving. Animae, Il Dandy/Arama, Morning Glory, Cesarina, International Smoke and Rare Society were among the dazzlingly delicious newcomers that helped make this one of the most exciting culinary years in memory. With a critical mass of first-rate eateries, San Diego is finally shedding its restaurant also-ran status and emerging as a bona fide dining destination. From strip malls to historic neighborhoods, homespun fare to boundary-pushing creations, Convoy Street to Carlsbad, Little Italy to La Jolla, North Park and beyond, nearly every opening tasted like a step forward.

Thanks to a flurry of last-minute appointments, most of San Diego County’s publicly traded companies have complied with a California law requiring at least one woman on their boards of directors by the end of 2019. Out of approximately 90 publicly traded companies in the county, only one has yet to name a female board member based on Union-Tribune research: Biotech Tracon Pharmaceuticals. The company did not respond to Union-Tribune emails or phone calls seeking comment. Tracon still could appoint a women to its board on the final day of the year. San Diego cannabis-industry landlord Innovative Industrial Properties, for example, said it planned to announce on Dec. 31 that it has added a female director to its board. In October, the San Diego City Attorney’s office sent letters to 19 San Diego firms that hadn’t complied with the law based on data from the Secretary of State’s Office. Since then, most firms have either added women to their boards or merged with other companies based elsewhere, sometimes ou

Navy SEALs who were never called to testify in the war crimes trial of Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher told naval criminal investigators about behavior they witnessed, including the alleged stabbing of a wounded ISIS fighter that led to murder charges against Gallagher. The two SEALs were granted immunity to testify in the trial this past summer, but were never called to the stand. Their interviews with criminal investigators will be available for streaming today on Hulu, on “The Weekly” from The New York Times. It will be broadcast on FX on Sunday. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service conducted the SEAL interviews more than a year before the San Diego court-martial of Gallagher, who was charged and acquitted of several war crimes, including murder.

A large group of frustrated Pacific Beach residents is lobbying for a curfew for Fanuel Park, which is frequently called “felony park” because of the drug dealing, prostitution, bicycle thefts and other crime there. Residents launched their campaign for a nighttime curfew shortly after San Diego approved curfews in March for five other city parks facing similar problems with drugs, vandalism and illegal activity. More than 500 local residents have signed a petition in support of a curfew that would be in effect from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. The parking lot adjacent to Fanuel Park is already closed from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. Police say curfews can be an effective crime-reduction tool because they limit opportunities for illegal activity and provide officers with another enforcement tool.

A singer, songwriter and guitarist, David Ponder knows the importance of a strong, steady beat. But this was ridiculous. “My heart now, it’s so strong,” said Ponder, 60, a Poway resident who in August 2016 underwent a successful heart transplant at Sharp Memorial Hospital. “The first night home, it was beating so hard it woke me up.” This Christmas, David Ponder is dazzled by the gifts he’s received from strangers: a life-sustaining organ and a life-enhancing relationship. He’s alive because a car wreck killed a man he’d never met, Coronado’s Juan Carlos Lopez, 26. When surgeons removed Lopez’s heart and transplanted it in Ponder’s chest, two families were stitched together in sorrow and joy. Months after the surgery, Ponder visited Lopez’s mother. The bond was instant.

Sometimes her life feels like one of those photos from the days before digital cameras, when images got bathed in trays of chemicals and came slowly into focus. Bertha Loaiza wants to see the whole picture. She has no memory of the day when she was 3 and her mother picked her up and stepped off the side of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. She may have been asleep. She survived the 240-foot fall into the water, but her mother didn't, and as Bertha recovered from serious eye and leg injuries, she got it into her head that a car accident was to blame. Kids have active imaginations, especially when the grownups don't say otherwise, and in the grandmother's house where she grew up, nobody talked about what really happened on Aug. 4, 1985. Then, when she was 17, she came across a VHS tape with news coverage of the suicide and the "miracle" child, the first person ever to plummet into the bay and live. "That looks like me," she said of the footage showing a little girl in a hospital bed surrounded

The Cruz family’s home on Thursday evening could have been the scene of any family reunited for the holiday season. The grandchildren played in the yard with their uncle, an Army officer who had returned home that morning. The grandmother doted on the youngest, a toddler. The air inside her home’s newly erected wooden fence echoed their laughter. But mixed in with the joy of togetherness was the knowledge that right after the holidays, the family matriarch Rocio Rebollar Gomez, 50, will have to leave the United States. Rebollar Gomez is waiting for a miracle, her only remaining option after all legal avenues for keeping her in the United States have been exhausted. But she believes it will come before Immigration and Customs Enforcement requires her to leave the country on January 2.

San Diego Gas & Electric executives spent 10 years seeking permission to charge customers hundreds of millions of dollars for company losses due to three backcountry wildfires started by its equipment in 2007. Lawyers for the power monopoly were thwarted at each turn — first by regulators, then by a state appellate court, the California Supreme Court and finally, in early October, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the case. The judges all concluded that SDG&E should not be able to recover $379 million in damages left over from the Witch, Guejito and Rice fires. Investigations showed that the three wildfires were the result of negligence and mismanagement committed by the utility — a finding the company never conceded. In reaching their decisions, the judges relied on what's known as the “just and reasonable” standard — the rule that utilities can only pass along to customers those costs that fairly serve consumers’ interest. It has been a cornerstone of California energy regulation for

Nearly three years after Mayor Kevin Faulconer agreed to a 20-year rent-to-own arrangement to take over an office tower at 101 Ash Street, the first city workers have begun moving into the remodeled office tower in downtown San Diego. The full migration of some 1,130 city workers will be completed in mid-January, and more than 100 planning department and information technology employees began moving in on Monday and are scheduled to relocate by the end of this week. The original goal was for city workers to move into the building two years ago. Now officials say the move is keeping up with a revised plan from August 2018. “We’re on time and within budget as we begin moving city employees into the building this week,” said Johnnie Perkins, one of the city’s deputy chief operating officers, in an email Monday. “This is really a long-term investment for the city that will save tens of millions of taxpayer dollars over time, create more effective and efficient work spaces for city employees and significantly impr

Starting New Year’s Day, more than 3 million veterans nationwide, including tens of thousands of local veterans, will be able to shop at exchanges and commissaries on military bases and utilize their recreation facilities. A new law makes veterans who are registered with the Veterans Affairs healthcare system and who have service-connected disabilities eligible to access those facilities on military bases. Purple Heart recipients and former POWs also will have shopping privileges and access. In San Diego, almost 65,000 more veterans and caregivers are affected, the VA says. Until now only active duty military, retirees, Medal of Honor recipients and veterans who were 100 percent disabled could shop on base, which is often less costly than regular shopping because on-base shoppers don’t pay a sales tax.

The census-taker was furious. Locals, he told the San Diego Union, “are apathetic, indifferent and in many cases belligerent. And for what? Simply they could not, in their own obtuse minds, fathom what the census was being taken for.” This was in 1890, the 11th national census. The U.S. Constitution mandates that the nation’s inhabitants be counted once each decade, which sounds like a straight-forward task. As the irate census-taker discovered, it’s not and never has been. From 1791, when disputed census figures prompted President Washington’s first veto, to 2019, when the Trump administration urged a citizenship question, the census has courted controversy. While the census steers federal funds to a broad spectrum of public services, debates rage over what this exercise includes — census-takers once asked residents to count their home’s toilets — and what’s ignored. The 2020 census, for instance, will have 20 categories for race or ethnicity, including “white,” “black or African-American,” “Hispanic, Latino

Decades from now, when historians try to make sense of how the U.S. government treated detained migrants, they will be able to hear directly from the men and women in federal immigration detention centers. At least that’s the hope of Lisa Lamont, head librarian at San Diego State University who oversees a collection of more than 1,700 letters written by migrants in detention centers. “In 20, 30 or 40 years or even longer down the road, when researchers are researching this time in U.S. history, I think these letter are going to be invaluable,” she said. The population of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody has grown significantly since the beginning of the Trump administration. During fiscal year 2015 there were 28,449 unauthorized immigrants in detention facilities. That number increased to 38,106 and 42,188 in the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years, respectively. Projections show that number is expected to increase to 52,000 by the 2020 fiscal year, according to data from the federal government.

Is the growth of rooftop solar sustainable? | Joshua Emerson Smith by San Diego Union-Tribune

San Diego has halted enforcement of its new ban on polystyrene foam products in the wake of a lawsuit filed by the restaurant industry. City officials say they’ve decided to reverse course and conduct a thorough analysis of the ban’s effects on the environment, which the lawsuit contends the city was legally obligated to do before adopting the controversial law.