More stories

  • in

    Californians Share Their Pandemic Silver Linings, Four Years Later

    Readers have been writing to me about ways that, despite all the tragedy, Covid brought something unexpectedly positive into their lives.An empty Santa Monica beach in March 2020, a day before Californians were ordered to stay home.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesIt was four years ago today that Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered all Californians to stay home to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. For many people, the drastic move was the moment when the pandemic became truly, horribly real.Covid has since killed more than 1.18 million people nationwide, and the virus continues to circulate. At the peak of the recent surge in January, 2,400 people were dying of the disease each week. For many Americans, the pandemic has permanently reshaped life, as my colleague Julie Bosman wrote recently.Not all of those changes have been for the worse. Readers have been writing to me recently about pandemic silver linings — ways that, despite all the tragedy, Covid brought something unexpectedly positive into their lives. Those stories of reconnecting with far-flung friends, picking up new hobbies or slowing down for the better were touching. Thanks to all who sent them in.Feel free to email me your own pandemic silver lining story at CAtoday@nytimes.com. Please include your full name and the city where you live.Here are some, lightly edited:“My adult son, who lives in Los Angeles, gathered his remote-work tools and joined our family pod in Escondido. His sister, who had already been planning a temporary move-in during her home’s remodel, packed up her husband, two small children and two dogs and moved into our house. This is where we all rode out the early months of the pandemic. Three months. We never would have had that in the before times.” — Gretchen Pelletier, Escondido“I am an autistic adult living in a society not meant for me. It was nice that the world slowed down to a pace that I was comfortable with. I also loved teaching remotely with my adult E.S.L. [English as a second language] students. Even though I am required to teach in person again, the techniques I used to guide students made me a better blended-hybrid teacher now.” — Robert B. Gomez, SalinasWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Larry H. Parker, Famed Personal Injury Attorney, Dies at 75

    In the Los Angeles area, Mr. Parker was a common sight on billboards and television commercials in which he promised to stand up to faceless insurance companies.Larry H. Parker, an accident and personal injury lawyer whose television commercials promised he’d “fight for you” and became staples in living rooms across Los Angeles, died on March 6 in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. He was 75.His death was confirmed by his son, Justin Parker, who did not cite the cause.Over the years, Angelenos became familiar with Mr. Parker’s personal brand of braggadocio and promise, as his face could be seen on billboards across the city and on television ads.“When it comes to the law, you want someone who carries a big stick,” a narrator says in one commercial that cuts from a hockey brawl to a shot of Mr. Parker in a suit and glasses, standing with both hands on a desk, ready for a courtroom showdown.“People sometimes ask me why I seem so angry in my television commercials,” Mr. Parker said in another ad. “Well the truth is I am angry. I’m angry when big insurance companies take advantage of little people.”His ads cultivated an image of a legal brawler whose menacing presence on the screen could be used in a plaintiff’s favor.It appeared that those who were injured were eager to engage the services of his firm, the Law Offices of Larry H. Parker. Since its founding 50 years ago, the firm has recovered more than $2 billion in verdicts and settlements, according to its website.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    California Proposition 1 Election Results 2024

    Polls close at 11 p.m. Eastern time. In the 2022 state primaries, first results were reported 11 minutes later, and the last update of the night was at 6:10 a.m. Eastern time with 48 percent of votes reported. All active registered voters were mailed a ballot, which must be postmarked by Election Day and received […] More

  • in

    Has San Francisco Lost Its Liberal Soul?

    In a city known as a progressive bastion, voters resoundingly passed two conservative-leaning ballot measures this week, on police authority and drug screening.Department of Elections workers transported a box of ballots at the San Francisco City Hall voting center on Tuesday.Loren Elliott/ReutersHave San Francisco voters lost the bleeding hearts they have been known for — or are they just frustrated?City voters resoundingly passed two ballot measures this week that probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day a few years ago. One measure gives more power to the police, and the other requires welfare recipients who are thought to have a drug addiction to enter treatment as a condition of continuing to receive benefits.Critics of the measures said that residents had veered to the right and that billionaires had bought the city by throwing money at campaigns for the measures. But Mayor London Breed, who faces a tough race for re-election in November and who placed the two measures on the ballot, brushed off claims that the city had lost its liberal soul.In her annual State of the City address on Thursday, Breed argued that it was progressive to invest in public safety to protect vulnerable older residents and immigrants, and to push for drug treatment for those who need it.“We are a progressive, diverse city, living together, celebrating each other,” she said, standing at a podium at the city’s cruise ship terminal, apparently to highlight the rebound of San Francisco’s tourism industry. “That has not changed, and it will not change.”San Francisco’s reputation has plummeted — unfairly, many residents say — since the start of the pandemic, because of open-air drug use, property crime and the sharp drop in office occupancy downtown. Breed, a political moderate by San Francisco standards, has responded by tacking to the right, and this week voters backed her priorities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Why California Hasn’t Ditched Daylight Saving Time

    Our clocks will have to spring forward an hour on Sunday, as in most of the country.One of the oldest arguments for the time change is that it saves energy, but there have been many conflicting studies about whether that’s true.Leon Neal/Getty ImagesAt 2 a.m. on Sunday, clocks in California will jump forward an hour, as we make the switch to daylight saving time.The impending loss of 60 minutes of precious sleep got me wondering why the state hasn’t abandoned the twice-a-year changing of the clocks, even though I’ve been hearing about that possibility for years.It turns out to be complicated.As a refresher: Each year in the United States, we spring forward an hour in March, and then go back to standard time in November. The idea is to shift an hour of sunlight from the early morning to the evening, when more people can make use of it. One of the oldest arguments for the time change is that it saves energy, but there have been many conflicting studies about whether that’s true.Changing our clocks has been linked not only to disrupted sleep, as you might expect, but also to a higher risk of car accidents, heart attacks and more. The only states that don’t make the biannual switch are Arizona and Hawaii.In November 2018, Californians overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to allow the Legislature to change the daylight saving time period. But the measure didn’t actually end it.There have been several failed attempts since then to abolish the time change by making daylight saving time permanent. But federal law does not currently allow for such a thing. In the last five years, 19 states have enacted legislation or passed resolutions to move to daylight saving time year-round, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, but they’re all contingent on congressional action.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Chinese National Accused of Stealing AI Secrets From Google

    Linwei Ding, a Chinese national, was arrested in California and accused of uploading hundreds of files to the cloud.A Chinese citizen who recently quit his job as a software engineer for Google in California has been charged with trying to transfer artificial intelligence technology to a Beijing-based company that paid him secretly, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday.Prosecutors accused Linwei Ding, who was part of the team that designs and maintains Google’s vast A.I. supercomputer data system, of stealing information about the “architecture and functionality” of the system, and of pilfering software used to “orchestrate” supercomputers “at the cutting edge of machine learning and A.I. technology.”From May 2022 to May 2023, Mr. Ding, also known as Leon, uploaded 500 files, many containing trade secrets, from his Google-issued laptop to the cloud by using a multistep scheme that allowed him to “evade immediate detection,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California.Mr. Ding was arrested on Wednesday morning at his home in Newark, Calif., not far from Google’s sprawling main campus in Mountain View, officials said.Starting in June 2022, Mr. Ding was paid $14,800 per month — plus a bonus and company stock — by a China-based technology company, without telling his supervisors at Google, according to the indictment. He is also accused of working with another company in China.Mr. Ding openly sought funding for a new A.I. start-up company he had incorporated at an investor conference in Beijing in November, boasting that “we have experience with Google’s 10,000-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it,” prosecutors said in the indictment, which was unsealed in San Francisco federal court.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    California’s Primary Results: What We Know So Far

    Representative Adam Schiff and the former M.L.B. player Steve Garvey will face off in November for a U.S. Senate seat.Voting at the Glendale Express Hotel in Glendale on Tuesday.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesA number of races from Tuesday’s primary election in California remain too close to call, but the most-watched contest is a done deal.Representative Adam Schiff, the lead prosecutor in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, and Steve Garvey, a former Major League Baseball player, will advance to the general election in November for a full term in the U.S. Senate seat that Dianne Feinstein held for more than three decades before she died last year.As of early this morning, with just under half of the ballots counted, Schiff, a Democrat, had about 33 percent of the vote and Garvey, a Republican, had 32 percent. Representative Katie Porter, an Orange County Democrat, was running a distant third with about 14 percent of the vote, and Representative Barbara Lee, a progressive Democrat from Oakland, was fourth with 7 percent.The results were effectively the same in the special primary being conducted at the same time to fill the last few weeks of the current Senate term, from Election Day in November until the end of the year. In that contest, which attracted fewer minor candidates, Garvey was running ahead of Schiff, 35 percent to 31 percent, with Porter at 16 percent and Lee at 9 percent.California’s election system pits all candidates against one another in the same primary, regardless of party, and the top two vote-getters advance. So the general election could have been a contest between Schiff and another Democrat, Porter or Lee. That kind of intraparty battle for a Senate seat has happened twice before in California.But this time, Garvey’s name recognition as a former star first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres helped consolidate Republicans behind his campaign — and so did Schiff’s advertising strategy, as my colleague Shawn Hubler reported.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Haley wins surprise Vermont victory as Biden and Trump dominate Super Tuesday

    Joe Biden and Donald Trump largely cruised to easy victories on Super Tuesday. In early results, Biden and Trump captured wins in their respective primaries in California, Virginia, North Carolina, Maine, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Colorado and Minnesota. Biden also won the Democratic caucus in Iowa and Vermont, but lost American Samoa, while Nikki Haley won the Republican primary in Vermont – her second victory of 2024.The United States has not witnessed a primary campaign season with so little competitive tension since political primaries began to dominate the nomination process in the 1970s. Neither the current president nor the former president secured the nomination of their respective parties, but both are likely to do so within the next two weeks.Both candidates took shots at each other in statements and speeches on Tuesday evening. Biden said Trump was focused on “revenge and retribution” and “determined to destroy democracy”.“Tonight’s results leave the American people with a clear choice: are we going to keep moving forward or will we allow Donald Trump to drag us backwards into the chaos, division, and darkness that defined his term in office?” Biden said.In a victory speech at Mar-a-Lago, Trump praised his wins, stating that “never been anything like this” and again attacked migrants, falsely claiming that US cities are “being overrun by migrant crime”. The former president has frequently derided migrants and made baseless and racist comments that they are dangerous.Biden sweeps, but with warning signsBiden requires 1,968 delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. Going into Super Tuesday, he held 206. Primaries and caucuses today offered another 1,420. Assuming Biden continues to sweep through primary contests, the earliest he could secure the nomination on the first ballot would be 19 March with results from Florida, Illinois, Kansas and Ohio.Democratic candidates can win delegates with 15% or more of the vote in a congressional district. California’s 424 Democratic delegates were the richest haul of the evening.View image in fullscreenVotes for write-in candidates typically take days to tabulate, but observers have been acutely watching for “uncommitted” or “none of the above” protest votes to register displeasure with the Biden administration’s policy on the Israel-Hamas war. The campaign has gained more ground after a strong showing in Michigan last week.William Galvin, secretary of state for Massachusetts, told reporters today that if enough voters selected “no preference”, a delegate may be assigned to that option.Trump marches on, but party rifts visibleTrump entered Super Tuesday with 273 delegates, requiring 1,215 needed to win the nomination outright at the Republican National Convention. Super Tuesday offered 865 delegates, but Nikki Haley’s continued campaign has prevented Trump from claiming all of them. With tonight’s results, the earliest Trump could secure the nomination is also 19 March with Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kansas and Ohio.View image in fullscreenTrump gained a late-game reprieve in Colorado when the US supreme court unanimously ruled on Monday that states cannot unilaterally kick a presidential candidate off the ballot using the 14th amendment and was expected to win Colorado.Haley won the District of Columbia primary on Sunday, becoming the first woman to win a Republican presidential primary in history. Only about 2,000 people voted in the primary but she did score her first state win on Tuesday with Vermont.Notable state races hold more upsetsCalifornia voters have been focused on the state’s highly-contested down ballot race to fill the seat held by Dianne Feinstein, the late US senator. California places the top two candidates from the primary in a runoff.Adam Schiff, the centrist Democratic congressman and longtime Trump antagonist, was declared the first place winner. He will face off with Republican Steve Garvey, a former professional baseball player, in November.But voters in California were unenthusiastic and analysts projected the state could see its lowest voter turnout in history.“I’m not excited about any of the issues, I just needed to take a walk today so I decided to drop off my ballot,” said Daniel, a 50-year-old voter who declined to share his last name.Texas held state and federal legislative primaries Tuesday, presenting Texan voters with a Republican grudge match over state politics. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has been on a revenge tour to punish legislators who voted for his impeachment on corruption allegations last year, issuing a long list of endorsed challengers to incumbents.About half of a slate of endorsed challengers have either claimed victory or are taking incumbents to a runoff, including a challenger to the powerful Texas speaker of the house, Dade Phelan. Late returns suggested Phelan will face Trump-backed challenger David Covey.Four claimed open seats and seven challengers won primaries outright, while seven others will go on to runoffs. One of those runoffs will feature Katrina Pearson, Trump’s former spokeswoman, who is neck-and-neck with Justin Holland, a state representative, in the suburban Dallas district.View image in fullscreenTed Cruz, the US senator, secured the Republican nomination with no major GOP competitors. Democratic representative Colin Allred beat out Roland Gutierrez, who has emerged as a national gun control advocate following the Uvalde shooting, to face Cruz in November.Alabama voters in a newly-redrawn second congressional district pushed Democrats Anthony Daniels and Shomari Figures to a runoff while Republicans Dick Brewbaker and Caroleene Dobson also face a runoff. The US supreme court forced Alabama to redraw its congressional map last year, declaring it a racial gerrymander that illegally diminished the political power of Black voters. As a result, two white Republican congressmen – Jerry Carl and Barry Moore – faced each other for a single seat after their districts were redrawn. Moore beat out incumbent Carl in the first district.More than 6,000 voters in the second district received postcards with incorrect voting information ahead of the primary, which a county official attributed to a software error.Notably Tom Parker, chief justice of Alabama’s supreme court, who issued a religiously-inflected ruling on the personhood of frozen embryos last month, was not on the ballot tonight. Alabama bars judges over the age of 70 from running for re-election; his term ends in 2025. The winner of the Republican nomination to succeed Parker is Sarah Stewart, an associate justice on the Alabama supreme court who was part of the court’s majority ruling on the embryo case.In North Carolina, the Republican state legislature redrew congressional maps last year after winning a majority on the state supreme court. As a result, the current delegation of 14 congresspeople will likely change from a 7-7 split to a 10-4 Republican majority and the most competitive seats have attracted sharp primary contests, particularly the 13th district.North Carolina’s first congressional district in the state’s coastal north-east has historically held a Democratic, mostly-Black majority. Lawmakers redrew it to be much more competitive for a Republican candidate. Representative Don Davis beat the 2022 Republican nominee, businesswoman and perennial candidate Sandy Smith, by four points. Smith this year lost the Republican primary to challenger Laurie Buckhout. .Meanwhile Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor, has won the Republican nomination for governor, to succeed North Carolina’s term-limited Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Robinson, North Carolina’s first Black lieutenant governor, has a history of sexist and inflammatory comments, particularly about Jews.Robinson’s opponent in November will be Democrat Josh Stein, the North Carolina attorney general who would be the state’s first Jewish governor. More