Death toll rises
Tomo Chien
February 07, 2024
Good morning. It’s Wednesday, and I’m reading about how you’ll be able to stream USC football with just one subscription next year thanks to a joint streaming venture by FOX, Warner Bros. and ESPN. Onto the five USC, Los Angeles and California stories you need to know for today.
Note: We’re launching an ad campaign for College Brief today. It’s a little, well, silly. Check THH, WPH, SOS, CPA, GFS, ASC and ANN for flyers later this morning. Try the men’s restrooms. Urinals and stalls. If you see an ad you like, snap a photo of it and tag @collegebrief on Instagram.
1.
The death toll rose to nine in this week’s record-breaking storm, the worst of which is expected to move on today. Still, officials warned that it’ll take very little additional rain to cause more flooding and mudslides thanks to the heavily saturated soil. LA County has seen at least 475 mudslides and 390 fallen trees since the outbreak of the storm. San Diego County briefly flirted with the possibility of a tornado yesterday, and at UC Santa Barbara, students were evacuated from an apartment after a bluff collapsed in front of the building.
2.
AT&T wants to pull the plug on landline services for most of California, including broad swaths of LA, arguing that the technology is “fast becoming a historical curiosity.” The telecommunications giant holds monopoly status, meaning customers have no other alternative. But old habits die hard. Rural residents, worrying of wildfires and medical emergencies, say they can’t rely on cell service and frequent power outages make internet service unreliable. “The consequences are life-threatening,” one policy director said.
3.
The contender raising the most money in recent months to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2026 hasn’t even declared his candidacy yet. Attorney General Rob Bonta — who says he’s “seriously considering” a run for the governorship — reported over $2 million in campaign contributions in the last seven months. That’s a half million more than the leading declared candidate, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, raised in the same time period. Unions are the top contributors to Bonta’s war chest.
4.
In this town, you can sip a craft beer at a bar where customers pay on the honor system, walk barefoot through a vegan cafe, browse a bookstore decorated with photos of Che Guevara and shop at a craft market in a converted bedsheet factory. Tech employees flocked here during the pandemic, looking to escape the suffocating political environment of big cities. Sound like somewhere in California? It’s not. Try “Dalifornia,” the Chinese mountain city of Dali that styles its easy-living ethos after the Golden State.
5.
It was close to midnight, and somebody waiting at a bus stop noticed something peculiar in a window above San Francisco’s Union Square. A bright red light was flashing “SOS” in Morse Code out the top floor of the Hotel Stratford, and the person at the bus stop quickly posted a video of it on Reddit. Could this be a distress signal? Thousands of commenters weighed in, some suggesting this could be a desperate cry for help from a victim of sex trafficking. Not so. “We have an eccentric tenant in that unit,” the hotel manager said. “He is fine.” Police agreed with the assessment.