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 degree. In 2019, officials recorded the lowest number of traffic-related deaths and injuries, including motorists, in the last four years, according to data from the San Diego Police Department. That comes after a bloody 2018 when pedestrian deaths and injuries spiked to 127 up from 92 the previous year.

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.

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 moved into the fast lane. Nationally, registrations for SUVs and pickups surpassed car sales years ago and sedans in California managed to hang on to a slight lead. The tipping point came in the second quarter of 2018 when the New Car Dealers Association of California reported registrations of 514,470 in light trucks compared to 512,826 for the first six months of that year.

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 outside of state. “We are glad to be able to alert companies,” said Deputy City Attorney Marni Von Wilpert. “City Attorney Mara Elliott has said our city needs more women to bring their problem-solving skills and inclusive mindset to positions of leadership. This is one opportunity to do that.” The city attorney plans to check compliance again in January.

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 by dolls, letters and stuffed animals sent by well-wishers from as far away as Mississippi. She watched the tape over and over, 100 times maybe, and put together the pieces. Her mother, 24-year-old Angelica Gomez, parking a green Ford Pinto mid-span on the bridge. Two fishermen pulling them out of the water. Doctors speculating that she survived because her mother held on to her all the way down and took the brunt of the impact. But finding out the truth only raised more questions, none more troubling than this: "Why did she take me with her?"

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 more than 100 years. Under Assembly Bill 1054, which was introduced, passed and signed into law within a matter of days over the summer, the legal standards have changed.

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 improve customer service with a new home for Development Services.”

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 or Spanish,” “American Indian or Alaska Native” and 11 Asian groupings. Yet there’s no specific accounting for people of Middle Eastern or North African descent; the form suggests that “white” includes “Lebanese, Epyptian, etc.”

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.

A former sheriff’s deputy who admitted on-the-job misconduct with 16 women was sentenced Tuesday to three years and eight months in jail, plus 16 months under supervision in the community, for behavior a judge described as “abhorrent.” Richard Timothy Fischer, 33, pleaded guilty in September to seven criminal counts — none of them specifically charged as sex crimes, though sexual misconduct was at the core of several allegations. Under that deal, he faced up to five years in custody. That’s technically what he received because of California’s public safety realignment law, which allows some non-violent offenders to serve part of their sentence locally, in county jail rather than state prison, and part of the term on mandatory supervision. Fischer was taken into custody at the end of the hearing in the Vista courthouse. He must serve 22 months in jail before he is eligible for release.

Just a day before the Dec. 11 deadline and more than a year after the original language was agreed to, county Supervisor Jim Desmond next week will ask his colleagues to change the wording of a controversial ballot measure that will be voted on countywide in March 2020 concerning future development in the unincorporated areas. Much like what happened on Nov. 19, when the board voted 3-2 to change the wording of another ballot measure having to do with a development in the North County -- the 2,135-home Newland Sierra project -- Desmond is seeking a change he says will help voters better understand what they are being asked to decide. If approved, the Save Our San Diego Countryside (SOS) measure would require countywide votes every time a General Plan Amendment was being sought to build large housing projects in areas not zoned for such density.

The number of African migrants heading to the U.S. through Mexico has more than doubled this year — from roughly 2,700 in 2018 to 5,800 today, according to data from the federal government. That figure has been steadily rising since 2007 — the year the Mexican government began including migrants from African countries who have contact with immigration officials in their annual migration reports — when the number was 460. And that dramatic increase has been mostly left out of U.S. immigration conversations, activists say.

Welcome to Legacy International Center, a $190 million Bible-themed resort rooted in a vision that 88-year-old pentecostal preacher Morris Cerullo says was handed down by God. Widely known for his overseas crusades and worldwide ministering for the last 70 years, the longtime televangelist has relocated the headquarters of Morris Cerullo World Evangelism to the retreat. The project was built debt-free, financed with a combination of donations from thousands of Cerullo's followers and proceeds from the sale of ministry assets, including the organization's former offices on Aero Ct.

For the second time in four years, Ballast Point — a San Diego craft beer pioneer that became one of the areas’s largest breweries — has been sold. Kings & Convicts Brewing Co., a tiny Illinois firm, on Tuesday announced an agreement to buy Ballast Point from New York-based Constellations Brands, Inc. Terms of the sale were not disclosed, but includes Ballast Point’s four California brewpubs — at the main brewery in Miramar; Little Italy; Anaheim’s Downtown Disney; and Long Beach — plus one in Chicago.

A recent analysis of a year’s worth of stops by San Diego police and county sheriff’s deputies found that black people across the county are searched, arrested and subjected to force at higher rates than white people. The report also states that both the San Diego Police Department and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department exhibit anti-Latino bias, anti-LGBTQ bias and bias against people with disabilities in their search practices. The report was disputed by law enforcement officials, who say the findings don’t match their own data and unfairly paint the actions of officers as discriminatory. The study, commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego & Imperial Counties at the beginning of the year, analyzed information collected under the state Racial and Identity Profiling Act. The 2015 law requires officers and deputies to gather data about the people they interact with in the field, including perceived age, perceived race, the reason for the stop and the result of the stop.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, admitted his guilt Tuesday in a yearslong campaign-finance scandal and now awaits his sentence. The U.S. Marine veteran all but ended his political career during a brief hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Thomas J. Whelan, admitting to a single count of conspiracy to convert campaign funds to personal use. When asked how he now pleaded, he said, “Guilty.” Hunter faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced March 17, but he is likely to receive much less time behind bars. Outside the courthouse, federal prosecutors said they opened their case after reading about Hunter’s campaign spending in a story in The San Diego Union-Tribune, and they specifically named reporter Morgan Cook.

After years of denials and claims he was the target of a political witch hunt, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, is scheduled to appear in federal court Tuesday morning to plead guilty in a sweeping campaign finance investigation. The announcement was posted on the U.S. District Court docket Monday morning, then KUSI aired an interview with Hunter in which he said he will plead guilty to one of the 60 criminal charges against him. He suggested that he is likely to spend time in custody. “The plea I accepted is misuse of my own campaign funds, of which I pled guilty to only one count,” Hunter told the station. “I think it’s important that people know that I did make mistakes. I did not properly monitor or account for my campaign money. I justify my plea with the understanding that I am responsible for my own campaign and my own campaign money.”

Pacific Magazine editor Nina Garin discusses the latest issue which focuses on local specialties that sell great gifts for the holidays.

The holidays were the worst. That’s not because Marissa and Chris Heintschel hated Thanksgiving or Christmas — far from it. Both raised in large Catholic families, they cherish having a full house, echoing with relatives’s chatter and children’s laughter, the air scented with the rich aromas of turkey and pie. Since 2016, though, these celebrations have had a desperate undertone. Each year, Chris would tell Marissa the same thing: “This is our last holiday with them. Let’s make it their best.” Three years ago, the Escondido couple became foster parents to two sisters suffering from physical abuse, malnutrition and a host of medical issues. Annalee, then 2, was coughing and sniffling when the Heintschels took her home. Her 9-month-old sister, Valerie, needed another five days in Rady Children’s Hospital. Burning with a 105-degree fever and only 12 pounds, the infant hadn’t the strength to lift her head. When the Heintschels finally retrieved her from the hospital, the foster mother tried to hug the baby. “She went stiff as a board,” Marissa said, “like she’d never been touched before.”