Good morning. It’s Wednesday, and I’m reading about the Los Angeles restaurant frequented by Marlon Brando that sold Hollywood on Mexican food. Onto the five USC, Los Angeles and California stories you need to know for today.

1.

Sophomore Bryan Fernandez was elected president of the Undergraduate Student Government alongside his running mate, vice president and sophomore Brianna Sanchez. The two campaigned on creating a USC that “C.A.R.E.s about our students” — the acronym being community, accessibility, representation and equity. Around 4,100 students voted this year, which was the first time both the presidential and senate elections adopted a ranked-choice voting system. I think we ought to create a USC that “L.O.F.T.S.” Starts with “lower,” ends with “tuition, stat!” 

Quinten Seghers / Annenberg Media

2.

Around 200 anti-Israel protestors at UC Berkeley shut down a guest lecture by an Israeli lawyer, breaking down a door, smashing a window and allegedly roughing up student attendees in the process. One of the event’s organizers said the protestors grabbed a student, spit on him and called him a “dirty Jew”; shoved another into the auditorium door; and grabbed another by the neck. The university expressed its “deep remorse and sympathy” and said it was aware of the crowd that mobbed the auditorium but couldn’t substantiate the injuries. “I’ve had all the Berkeley time I can handle,” said one of the event’s student organizers.

Nanette Asimov / San Francisco Chronicle

3.

A Beverly Hills middle school was left reeling after students circulated AI-generated nude photos of their classmates last week, the latest in a string of similar incidents across the country. School officials are still investigating the incident, and said the images superimposed photos of the classmates’ faces onto artificially generated nude bodies. California has no criminal law against non-consensual deepfake pornography, but does allow victims to sue for damages. The school said it’s prepared to expel the students who created the images.

Jon Healey / Los Angeles Times

4.

A federal judge struck down a California ban on billy clubs and batons, arguing that it unconstitutionally violated the Second Amendment. Such weapons have been banned in the state — with exceptions for law enforcement and some state-licensed security guards — for over a century now. “If people have the right to own and carry a handgun, it makes very little public policy sense that they can’t carry a billy club,” said a lawyer representing two veterans who challenged the ban.

Alex Riggins / The San Diego Union-Tribune

5.

In 1747, King Ferdinand VI of Spain issued a decree that stated, simply: “California is not an island.” It was an attempt to finally lay to rest a centuries-old cartographical fallacy that California was, in fact, an island separate from the mainland. You can thank a mutineer from Hernan Cortez’s 1533 Mexico expedition for the confusion. When the man stumbled upon the elongated Baja California peninsula, he mistook it for an island and named it “California” after a fictional island of the same name in a popular novel. The fallacy persisted for centuries, sometimes by design — the British discovered Point Reyes, so the Spainards called California an island so they could maintain their claim on the mainland — but mostly by accident.

Frank Jacobs / Atlas Obscura