Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Sorted by date Results 251 - 275 of 312
3/29: The Observer has learned the names of both the perpetrator and victims in what Long Beach Police called an act of workplace violence Friday. "Major Langer came to the office to fire a named partner named John Mendoza. Mendoza pulled out a gun and shot Major dead and shot Ron (Beck) in the stomach. Ron's in the hospital with serious injuries," says our source. "Then Mendoza shot himself to death, too." In the 1990's, Los Angeles personal injury attorney Larry H Parker became locally...
The Postman only rings twice. But sometimes, not at all. Some local residents complain of poor service and frankly odd behavior by the Postman lately. On social media, some residents note that delivery often occurs after 9pm and delivered by people not in uniform. At local post offices, some days the boxes are not delivered until the end of the day. At residences, letter carriers knock at doors after dark, but do not place mail in mailboxes as they would during the day. Regular carriers appear...
It has been called the Christmas gift for California businesses that keeps on giving. California has a little-known device for avoiding certain taxes when filing an LLC or corporation, that is only available the last 2 weeks of December. Businesses started during the last 2 weeks of the year pay no taxes for 2017, but enjoy the corporate shield for the entire year. As the end of every year, some entrepreneurs suddenly decide to start a new business or incorporate and existing DBA. The limited...
Santa Monica College announced that it will officially open its newest campus-housing The Center for Media and Design (CMD) and the KCRW Media Center-on December 2, 2017. We have repeatedly pointed out that only 4% (yes that's right, FOUR PERCENT) of SMC students are Santa Monica High School graduates, and that about half the student body are foreigners, who pay top dollar to study abroad. So it's unclear to us exactly how this will benefit local residents. But saying that is a little like...
Correction, 12/4/17: Laila from Untitled Number One School, says that the number of children proposed for the preschool is 20, not 50. "Most importantly, our Planning Commission approval is based on that maximum number of 20. The Statement of Official Action is linked to the Agenda for this Tuesday's City Council mtg. here:" http://santamonicacityca.iqm2.com/Citizens/Detail_Meeting.aspx?ID=1107 Sharing is caring, but not in my back yard when it comes to one neighborhood and a preschool. 2953...
In Showtime's Ray Donovan, seedy characters regularly bribe LA officials to get contracts and hide the truth. But that's just television. Or is it. Chances are good you've parked your car in those large parking lots in lower Westwood. You might have wondered who owns them. The answer is, you do, through the Federal government. A story of who manages VA parking lots in Westwood begs the question of how he landed such lucrative contracts in the first place. The answer from the US Attorney for the...
Singer Joni Mitchell is 74 years old today. The song writer of hits such as "Both Sides Now," "Big Yellow Taxi (They Paved Paradise)," and "Woodstock" (where she actually performed); famously gave up a daughter at 20 to pursue a career. She said that prior to her, singing was male dominated and that "all songs were about men seducing women. I ended that." olling Stone called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever" and AllMusic has stated, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as...
2/11/17: As of today, Police still have release no information about a suspect in the shooting of a young woman from a party bus on Ocean Avenue, near the Santa Monica Pier. This almost certainly means authorities still don't know his identity, or even how many shooters were involved. De'Ommie De La Cruz was shot dead at 1 am Saturday as a result of a verbal dispute between passengers of two buses parked in the busy area across from the Pier. Witnesses said that or three men fired guns into De...
There is an apocryphal story going around social media, that a man has figured out how to game the system so every day is his birthday, at Starbucks' corporation's expense. "My neighbor bought 365 Starbucks Gift Cards & registered each card so now it's his "birthday" every day & gets free Starbucks," tweeted Hamza, in one version of the story. "TIL a man bought 365 Starbucks Cards and registered each one for a different birthday, so he got a free birthday drink every day of the year" We are...
By American standards, it is a big problem in a small country. Greenland has the world's highest suicide rate, 50 per year in a population of around 56,000. This yields a suicide rate of nearly 1 per 1000, or 24 times the suicide rate in the US. Greenland sources tell us the country experienced 28 suicides in the first 9 months of 2017. Why do so many young Greenlanders kill themselves? No one knows for sure. Theories include geographical isolation and the cold. We state the problem at the end o...
Dove Soap, a division of Unilever, posted an ad on Twitter that many saw as racist. It shows a black woman removing a brown shirt to reveal a white woman. "I cannot conceive of how anyone at Dove thought this ad was acceptable. This is literally how Victorian soap was advertised by Unilever..." tweeted Hannah Rose . "Let's be clear, Dove knew exactly what they were doing with their racist ad. Soap companies used to do this racist theme all the time," tweeted Tariq Nasheed We missed the m...
Las Vegas Shooter Benjamin Paddock's father was also a "sociopath" and a killer, it turns out. He was at one time on the FBI's most wanted list, and was sentenced to a long prison term at the time of his death. In 1960, Benjamin Braddock tried to run over an FBI agent in Las Vegas, while fleeing from a bank robbery. He was also described as suicidal. His son, Stephen Paddock, committed suicide in Las Vegas after shooting more than 500 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas. The elder...
St. John in the US Virgin Islands was hit Friday by the most powerful Category 5 hurricane to ever come out of the Atlantic. Florida has taken all the press, attention from FEMA and the Coast Guard. Meanwhile, on St. John, power is out. There are reports of heavy damage and looting. Federal authorities are nowhere to be found, by some reports. Amier Salem, whose family owns the Bayside Mini-Market in Cruz Bay, has been living in the store as he tries to get home to St. Thomas. He said Wednesday...
Merchant Processing company went.com reports that Amazon Web services has contracted a virus or bug, which caused them to be off line for 24 hours. The email from Flint reads as follows: "Dear Flint Team, Over the past 24 hours our engineering team has been working around the clock on an issue regarding our servers. It turns out the issue was related to an AWS (Amazon Web Services) bug. We would like to inform you that the issue has been resolved and you should be able to access your Flint accou...
Boston.com offers readers 6 free webcams they can watch from Key West Florida. Don't read too much into this, but the Live Webcam broadcasts from Key West Florida suddenly went offline. Liveweb cams on Google's Youtube service are also offline. This apparently means the feed, or perhaps the power, has been cut. As I write this, Hurricane Irma is 78 miles from Key West and appears to be heading directly for the island city, home of La Conchas. The lost WebCams are titled "Live Southern Most...
In yet another example of how polarized our country has become, an online petition calls on musicians to boycott a concert of the Santa Monica Symphony to be guest conducted next month by Dennis Prager. He is a radio host whom some consider to be right wing, and the left cannot tolerate the right lately. Some cannot conscience someone with his views conducting an orchestra, even though he won't say anything. Now that's tolerance for you! Prager has been 'enthusiastically' invited by Santa...
Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin seems to have set himself up as the fall guy for the Los Angeles City Traffic Department's decision to narrow Venice Blvd from 3 lanes running East and West, to 2 lanes in each direction. At a public meeting Tuesday night, residents complained to each other that the change, part of the City's "Great Street's Initiative," has made it impossible for them to drop their kids off at school and go to work. Bonin himself was quoted by KTTV as saying the change...
A medical evacuation jet taking off from Santa Monica Airport at 4:55 a.m. on the 4th of July awakened thousands of residents and presumably saving one patients life. It also violated an airport curfew from 10 pm to 7 am, on all takeoffs and landings. Many airport residents questioned whether it was worth it. Chain e mail went to members of the City Council, and other local residents. "I am still shaking from that take off..it was so loud," wrote Patty HMJ. "Do these folks, pilot even think of...
If you find yourself stuck in traffic on Lincoln Blvd as you drive to Los Angeles International Airport, there's a reason for it. The City of Los Angeles has begun re-striping traffic lanes in Playa Vista, in an attempt at "traffic calming." This after several recent accidents in Playa Vista, including one that claimed the life of a 16 year old girl walking home from school. Needless to say, not everyone is calmed or pleased. Culver Blvd along Ballona Creek to Pershing Drive or Del Rey has long...
There are only 17 million of them. They started out their adoption as currency at a Papa Johns pizza parlor in 2008. Today, they are worth more than $2800 each. And if you have been living somewhere other than cyberspace, they are called Bitcoin or Block Chain. China has threatened to permanently block the use of the crypto currency, which apparently can be used to circumvent the PRC's limitation on the outflow of capital from China. However, it appears that the Chinese Cyberspace Regulatory Age...
Update: Lunken Airport Manager confirms Otto Warmbier will arrive at Lunken around 10pm, he will then be transported to UC Medical Center. @WLWT pic.twitter.com/mUQHm6hjg… The North Korean government has finally released Otto Warmbier, 22, the University of Virginia college student who was detained for stealing a banner out of the balcony of his Pyongyang hotel room. The bad news is, he's been in a coma for 16 months after contracting botulism. Meanwhile, Warmbier's parents told Washington P...
Officials say at least 50 prisoners a day are executed, some in mass hangings, at the notorious Sednaya military prison outside of Damascus. And the officals accused Russia and Iran of complicity in "these atrocities." The U.S. released aerial photos of the facility and said its information came from "intelligence assessments" as well as human rights groups. "The Syrian Government has conducted and continues to conduct mass executions and burn the bodies afterwards,:" Auschwitz I was first...
It is one of the biggest non-mysteries of Asia: Why do DPRK (North Korea) ballistic missiles keep blowing up? The DPRK Rocket Force has a recent failure rate of 90%. The answer is, because the Chinese are blowing them to bits shortly after take off. Expert say that every ICBM or missile, contains an explosive safety charge to self-destruct an errant rocket before it hurts people on the ground. We don't know the radio frequencies that those components respond to, but the Chinese do. Chinese...
On Saturday 60 or 70 local kids jumped the turnstiles and committed 60 or 70 robberies of a San Francisco bound BART train, as it sat in the last West Oakland BART Station on it's way to the Transbay Tube. The kids (boys mostly), were filmed as they robbed frightened passengers at knife point. It's a spectacular crime, the kind that happens in some countries a lot, and in the US, not so much. The Bay Area Rapid Transit people have many ways to contact the public, muses the San Francisco...
Environmental groups and social-, racial- and economic justice groups marched for climate action on Saturday, April 29, 2017 in Denver and 11 other cities in Colorado. As the event began, outside temperatures were a freezing 31 degrees Farenheit. Water freezes below 32 degrees Farenheit, which is also zero degrees Celsius. The events are among the 330 sister marches throughout the U.S. and globally to rally for public policies that recognize and seek to slow climate change. The events are also...
