Daily Republic: Monday, May 8, 2023

The Week Ahead: Dixon May Fair starts Thursday A3

Warriors vs. Lakers is about bragging rights B1

33-year-old man identified as Allen Premium Outlets suspected shooter

Tribune ConTenT AgenCy

DALLAS — The gunman who killed eight people and injured seven others before being fatally shot by police has been identified as a 33-year-old man, according to reports.

The Associated Press on Sunday identified the assailant as Mauricio Garcia; a request to the Texas Department of Public Safety for confirmation was not immediately answered. Authorities executed search warrants late Saturday at two locations, including a Dallas hotel, where the shooter was purportedly staying. Investigators continue to work to identify the dead and determine why the shooter dressed in tactical gear opened fire on innocents.

DA

DRNEWS@DAILYREPUBLIC.NET

FAIRFIELD — Mark Rossi was evacuated from his Green Valley home for a week during the 2017 fire that claimed a couple of Highlands homes and threatened hundreds of others.

If not for a local arborist who was able to get up into the area and report back, Rossi would have had no way of knowing if he had a house to come back to.

“The fire was very close,” said Rossi, who is director of contract manufacturing for Jelly Belly.

Born and raised in Fairfield, he and his wife, Lori, returned to the area from Modesto in September 2014.

Three years later, he learned firsthand how the dense wildlands of Green Valley and the strong westerly winds can turn a lightning strike or human mistake into

an inferno.

Marvin and Jeri Schechtman have evacuated three times during the nearly quarter of a century they have lived in Green Valley.

“And we’ve seen some small (fires), too,” he said.

From his property, Schechtman can see the whole valley, and remembers that 2017 blaze as he watched it climb across Twin Sisters and destroy that iconic glass house.

He remembers watching the giant Boeing aircraft fly in to drop retardant on the fast-moving fires, too.

“Literally, we have been surrounded. It’s just horrifying,” Schechtman said.

Now Schechtman is a member of the Green Valley Fire Safe Council, which is working with the Cordelia Fire Protection District, the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and a number of other

property owners and agency partners to construct shaded fire breaks that will all but encircle the area.

Cordelia Fire Chief Dave Carpenter expects the first phase of that work to be done by the end of this month – May is National Wildfire Awareness Month – or possibly the early part of June.

A shaded fire break is essentially a crafted area in which the number of trees are thinned and the undergrowth is cleared away. This one spreads out 100 to 200 feet in different areas.

Carpenter said the finished work will allow fire crews access to the area from the ground, and allows retardant dropped from the sky to rain down through the forested canopy and reach ground levels.

The first phase includes a 24.5acre swath of land, what Carpenter calls a band, on the western side

See Fire, Page A7

As of 2:30 p.m. Sunday, police had not publicly identified the gunman or any of the victims.

The suspected shooter has no history incarceration within the state prison system, Texas Department of Criminal Justice Director of Communications Amanda Hernandez confirmed. The man had an active misdemeanor warrant for drug paraphernalia in Garland from 2020, according to police records.

All entrances to the mall were blocked off Sunday as investigators continued to process the crime scene. The mall will be closed Monday as well.

Vehicles on Sunday in Allen packed the lots of local churches, which are providing members with opportunities for prayer services and private counseling. Some of Allen’s pastors were working until late last night to deliver remarks to grieving community members. Saturday’s shooting at Allen Premium Outlets

See Suspect, Page A7

Biden trails Trump as his approval rating hits low in ABC poll

bloomberg news

President Joe Biden’s approval slid to a career low in the latest opinion poll for ABC News and the Washington Post that also showed the US leader lagging predecessor Donald Trump in early voter preferences for the 2024 election.

Tribune ConTenT AgenCy

SAN DIEGO — The first day that asylum seekers could make appointments through their smartphones to request protection at U.S. ports of entry, a 22-yearold mother and her three children in Tijuana rushed to try to secure their own place in the digital line.

More than three months later, she and thousands of other asylum seekers waiting in Mexico are still trying.

Though the pandemicera policy that created this smartphone appointment process — Title 42 — is set to end Thursday, asylum seekers’ experiences aren’t likely to change anytime soon.

A decades-old measure invoked by the Trump administration in March 2020, Title 42 was based on a public health order from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and used to blocked asylum seekers and other migrants from entering the United

States. It also allows border officials to expel those migrants to Mexico regardless of their nationality without reviewing their requests for protection if they crossed without permission.

Though it was presented as a way to slow the spread of Covid-19, revelations from whistleblowers and statements from politicians have made clear that it has been largely used in an effort to deter migration. Now that the declared health emergency is ending, so

will Title 42 orders. Many predict border crossings will increase in the short term.

But the policy has left its mark, with restrictions never before seen at the border and uncertainty about the coming weeks.

While the Biden administration has promised expanded pathways that would offer certain migrants alternatives to the dangerous journey to the U.S.-Mexico border, many details remain to

See Policy, Page A7

The percentage of those approving of Biden’s performance fell to 36%, six points lower than in February and a point off his previous low in early 2022, according to the survey conducted for the news organizations by Langer Research Associates. Some 56% disapproved of his performance, while 68% regarded Biden, at 80, as too old for another term.

On the question of whom voters prefer for 2024, only 44% viewed Trump, 76, as too advanced in years.

Participants also rated Trump’s physical health and mental acuity higher, and perceived the former president as having done a better job handling the economy when he was

president than Biden has done in his term so far.

When asked who they’d support in 2024, 44% said they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for Trump, more than the 38% who said they’d do the same for Biden.

The poll was conducted April 28-May 3 among a random national sample of 1,006 adults. Overall results had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The fight to save Solano’s Historical Records Commission

Irecently received a call to arms from Doug Rodgers, a tireless volunteer with the Vacaville Heritage Council. He had been informed that the Solano County Board of Supervisors were going to take a vote on dissolving the Solano County Historical Records Commission. Doug has been a commissioner for the better part of a decade.

I got a similar request from Solano County Genealogical Society volunteer Nancy Moreback.

Of course, I agreed to attend the meeting and speak on behalf of keeping it.

The bigger story is the Board of Supervisors formed an ad-hoc committee to assess several volunteer advisory committees and boards, which was a wholly appropriate thing to do. Some were recommended to be kept, some were to be restructured and some to be dissolved.

The Historical Records Commission was established by the board in 1987 after volunteers fought to preserve priceless county records.

Just a couple of asides before I get back into the main point of this column: That was a freakin’ long meeting! Almost four and half hours. It started like most governmental meetings do with presentations where the supervisors present proclamations, with appropriate whereases and therefores, to worthy groups or individuals. There was one celebrating Correctional Officers Week and they brought up Wally, a K-9 that specializes in sniffing out narcotics ... and electronics. That made me wonder for the rest of the day what my Samsung smelled like to a pooch.

Also one of the speakers who spoke on behalf of keeping the Ag Advisory Committee was local farmer Ian Anderson. When his name was announced

CORRECTION POLICY

to come to the mic, I thought they meant the flute player for Jethro Tull and prepared to hear a live performance of either “Aqualung” or “Cross-Eyed Mary,” which definitely would have been a first in the supervisorial chamber methinks.

Anyway, I spoke against dissolving the commission as did several others, including former Armijo teacher and former Fairfield City Councilman Jack Batson.

When the board discussed it, there was a brief lunge and parry between Supervisor Erin Hannigan and County Counsel Bernadette Curry. Hannigan was saying that unlike what the ad hoc committee presented, there was no records-retention policy. Curry countered, and commented that especially since there was press in the room (not me, I’m a humor columnist, she meant the real reporters) she needed to stress that in fact the county does have one. The point Hannigan was making was that evidently there is a messy trove of documents on the sixth floor of the Government Center, but Curry once again clarified that legally everything wasn’t a record and needed to be retained.

That was a draw, but then a Perry Mason moment happened.

A staff member was questioned about a 2018 report on the historical commission, which was created at a cost of $60,000. Hannigan and other long-timers on the board said they had never seen it. The staff member acknowledged that the report existed, but also said that it had never made it to the board. After five years and 60 grand! Cue dramatic music.

When the logical question “How did this happen?” bounced around the room, there were blank stares, floating question marks and empty thought balloons. It turned the tide and

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by a 4-1 vote the commission gave the Historical Records Commission a reprieve, at least temporarily until the report, now old enough for kindergarten, actually gets reviewed. That is the short version of what happened. The long one involved me trying to stay awake through some of the reports and wondering how long my bladder could hold out. While I am pleased they got a reprieve, there is a bigger issue here. The ad hoc committee said that the county has secured and preserved its historical records and that they comply with all legal requirements. The thing is complying with all legal requirements is not synonymous with being the most efficient resource for constituents. These are the county’s records and we are the county.

There is a procedure for getting access to historical records. You simply contact the staff member by email and they will investigate it for you and get back to you. In theory. Now I could not easily find just how to do it on the Solano County website. I’m not saying their website is a mess … OK, actually that is exactly what I’m saying.

Beyond that, Doug told me that many people have received no reply or waited months. Also that service is for people who know what specific item they are looking for. What about accidental historians like me who just want to browse what they have and check it out to mine stories to tell to fellow locals?

There must be a better way to handle Solano County’s historical records.

Actually, that’s not just me wishin’ and hopin’ like Dusty Springfield, we actually once had a better way.

In 2013, I did a story on the Solano County Archives, then at 815 Chadbourne Road in Fairfield. From 2005 to 2016 they were kept there and made discoverable and usable to visi-

tors. Volunteer archivist Leslie Batson was passionate about not only preserving past records, but making them accessible.

Batson worked with the architects of the spot to make the 2,000-square-foot facility as functional and as efficient as possible. It was temperature-controlled so the records didn’t expand and contract with changes in heat and cold, which is harmful to them.

“Having all of the different record types in one location facilitates research. The staff knows how to tease information out of what we have,” Batson said in 2013. “We often just need a date range to know where we should begin looking. One clue can lead to something else fruitful.”

Some of the items in the collection include:

Township court records: The Solano County Superior Court began in 1880, so in the 30 years prior there were inferior courts in different local townships including Suisun City and Fairfield.

Maps: 10,000 of them.

Abstracts of title: Since they were handwritten, good penmanship and accuracy was a job requirement.

Property tax rolls: In 1880, personal property was taxed, so lists can include wagons, sewing machines, watches and how many chickens. Cash in the bank was not taxable.

Great registers of voters: These are great resources for tracking men, as women could not vote until 1920.

Sealed records: Because of privacy laws, they are not accessible to researchers. The boxes are labeled “insane” for commitments and “intemperate” for substance abusers.

Solano Republican/Daily Republic newspapers: Going back to 1863.

Genealogical research and environmental studies are some of the reasons folks utilized the archives. But there are others.

Batson helped a Rio

Vista man get a fine of $250,000 dismissed by the state of California. He was dinged for illegally docking his boat and dredging equipment in a slough. The man’s only hope of getting the fine dismissed was to prove that the area of the slough he was in had ever been dredged. Using a collection of 1945 aerial photos taken for soil studies after the devastation of the Dust Bowl, Batson was able to prove it. The fine was dismissed.

That is the power of passionate volunteers. County staff are awesome, this is not to disparage them, but the true passion comes from folks who are putting their heart and soul into it without a paycheck.

I remember being blown away by how efficient and organized and accessible the archives were. They were honored in 2012 with the Society of California Archivists’ annual Archives Appreciation Award for their dedication.

Then in 2016 the records were packed up and shipped to a warehouse in Contra Costa County. I don’t know all the details of that decision, but I know the way it used to be was better.

When they were on Chadbourne, it was a vibrant, helpful accessible facility.

The system we have now is like the end of “Raiders of The Lost Ark,” where priceless and perhaps incredibly helpful items are warehoused and inaccessible.

We can do better.

Fairfield freelance humor columnist and accidental local historian Tony Wade writes two weekly columns: “ The Last Laugh” on Mondays and “Back in the Day” on Fridays. Wade is also the author of The History Press books “Growing Up In Fairfield, California,” “Lost Restaurants of Fairfield, California,” the upcoming book “Armijo High School: Fairfield, California” and hosts the Channel 26 government access TV show “Local Legends.”

Airbnb host said guest stole artwork, hung new painting; the internet rushed to help

The WashingTon PosT

Amy Corbett was in a Zoom meeting when she spotted something strange in her own background. The blackand-white painting of a map that normally hung above her couch was no longer there. Instead, it had been replaced with a painting of an airplane propeller, a painting she had never seen before.

“It freaked me out,” said Corbett, who is an Airbnb host, and had rented her apartment in Lynchburg, Va., in midApril. Could her guest have hung a different painting in place of her map?

Perplexed by the situation, Corbett scoured the apartment in search of the original map painting, but it was nowhere to be found. She sent her guest a message through the Airbnb platform, inquiring about what happened. He did not reply.

“I just couldn’t believe this,” said Corbett, a mom of two, who runs All Belong Co, a short-term property rental company, with her husband. “It was bizarre.” She does not live in the apartment, but she and her family live nearby, and when it’s not rented, she sometimes uses it for Zoom meetings and other purposes.

Although the map painting wasn’t pricey or particularly sentimental, Corbett said, she still wanted to get to the bottom of what happened. She decided to post about it on TikTok. Even though she only had about 60 followers, Corbett hoped some people might offer useful clues.

To her surprise, the video quickly went viral, amassing thousands of comments from strangers, many of whom had their own theories about what happened. The guest was swiftly nicknamed “the

Airbnb bandit.” Corbett declined to identify the guest by his full name. The Washington Post could not locate him for comment.

“They probably broke it and replaced it,” one person wrote.

“Could be an HGTV undercover project,” another chimed in.

“Maybe he’s the next Banksy,” someone said.

Dozens of people also wrote that they prefer the new painting over the original, and others accused Corbett of making up the story.

“Honestly, I feel like you should thank them,” someone wrote. “That awesome painting gives the room a pretty nice facelift.”

A few commenters claimed the same thing happened to them, and a bunch said the plane propeller painting had been stolen from another Airbnb. Still, despite the many hypotheses that poured in, none panned out.

More information was uncovered after Corbett checked her surveillance footage. An outdoor camera captured a man carrying the new painting – five minutes before checkout time, 11 a.m. – from his car and into the apartment. Then, wearing a different sweatshirt, he is seen carrying another large

item (seemingly the same size as the map painting) under a blanket and into his car.

Corbett shared a TikTok video with the updates. People were eager to get to the bottom of it.

“I knew it was more than just me who wanted to know,” she said. “We all wanted to know.”

More comments kept coming: “I’m dying to hear a conclusion to the story,” one person wrote. Corbett decided to debunk some of the theories that people came up with, including that the guest is a covert artist and created a customized painting specifically for the apartment.

“It’s a canvas painting. You can find it all over the web,” Corbett said in a TikTok video. It costs about $100.

To those who argued that the guest must have damaged the wall behind the painting, Corbett said: “No, it’s pristine.” In fact, apart from her missing art work, she said, he left the apartment in good condition.

She also explained that she contacted the guest’s previous Airbnb hosts and inquired about his behavior, surmising that perhaps he is swapping out the paintings at each place he stays. Although he did cause damage at one previous Airbnb, a host said, two hosts confirmed he did not steal or replace any artwork.

Considering she wasn’t getting answers from the guest, and she decided against reporting the situation to police, Corbett filed a claim with Airbnb. She sent in the documentation of the incident.

Although the guest never directly answered Corbett’s initial question about where her map painting went, he did eventually reply to her message, saying: “Why are

you making a claim about your artwork?” They have had no further communication since.

Airbnb then mediated the situation. In the end, the guest paid her $25, Corbett said, and the company compensated her an additional $100 for the map painting that she bought about five years ago.

“Art is covered in our AirCover policy and this Host was supported through that process,” Airbnb wrote in a statement to The Washington Post. “We have removed this guest for violating our policies.”

Corbett was satisfied with the resolution, particularly because the guest was removed from Airbnb. But she wasn’t sure what to do with the propeller painting –she definitely did not want it on her wall.

“We needed to turn a negative story into a positive one,” she said. “We started getting ideas of how we could do that.”

Corbett has commissioned a local artist to paint a new piece for above the couch, depicting the view of the James River from the apartment.

“It’s such a cool upgrade to support a local artist instead of just a big box store,” Corbett said. “It’s going to be something nicer, something handmade.”

She also decided to host a raffle for the propeller painting, and after the winner was drawn on May 1, all proceeds were donated to Rush Homes, a nonprofit that addresses housing instability in Lynchburg. Raffle tickets were $2 each, and nearly $1,500 was collected from people across the country.

Tony Wade Back in the day

Ashlee Glen courtesy photo Corbett with her family. From left, Caroline, 15, Corbett, Jameson, 10, and Marc.

Dixon May Fair starts Thursday

This year’s 146th

Annual Dixon May Fair begins Thursday.

A little something different will be offered this year: a sensory station – a calm, quiet and safe place for guests that feel overstimulated or overwhelmed at the fair.

The space is for anyone because anxiety has no age limit.

Fair Chief Executive Officer Patricia Conklin visited the New Mexico State Fair last year and saw their room and how it can enhance and improve the fair visit so all can attend.

“This will be a calm and safe place away from all the excitement of our fair,” she said, in a press release.

There will be a sensory wheel, books, soothing lights, sound and more.

The fair has Wait Cards in both Spanish and English. These cards assist when waiting in line. There is also a visual schedule, which is a tool to help plan you fair visit with picture, this too is in Spanish and English. The cards are available online to print in advance at https://dixonmayfair.com/ sensory-station.

The fair will offer several main events for the whole family:

n Friday at 7 p.m.: Bull & Bronc Riding Event

n Saturday at 7 p.m.: Maxx Kakl Powersports Tractor Pull Competition

n Sunday at 5:30 p.m.: Demolition Derby

Butler Amusements will have kiosks where you can purchase reloadable wristbands.

Hours will be 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Thursday; noon to 11 p.m. Friday; 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday and noon to 10 p.m. Sunday.

Ticket sales cease one hour before closing with no entrance at that time.

For more information, go to https:// dixonmayfair.com.

Vacaville Museum Guild hosts garden tour

The Vacaville Museum Guild will host another garden tour on Saturday.

The event will take place from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Vacaville Museum courtyard, 213 Buck Ave.

Seven gardens will be featured this year – from downtown to away from town, from intimate to grandiose, and from lowwater to lush and ready for a party.

Tour participants may pick up their garden guide brochure beginning at 8:30 a.m. Complimentary light refreshments will be served at that time, raffle prizes will be on display.

The Vaca Valley Garden Club and the Solano County Master Garden ers will be on hand, as will the Willis Jepson chapter of the California Native Plant Society, to talk about plants and answer garden ing questions.

Tickets, $30, will be available for purchase from 1 to 4:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday at the museum. They may also be purchased online, vacavillemuseum.org, or by ringing the doorbell or calling the museum at 707-447-4513 during office hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. All those who attend must purchase a ticket, including children.

International Bird Rescue hosting World Migratory Bird Day

The International Bird Rescue is hosting a World Migratory Bird Day on Saturday.

The event will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Cordelia Slough Youth Education Program site just off of Ramsey Road in Fairfield.

It also will serve as the first in-person open house since 2019 for the International Bird Rescue.

The event is open to the public, but registration is required at www. birdrescue.org.

Fairfield school district hosts

Community Fun Run

Fairfield-Suisun Unified will host a Community Fun Run on Saturday.

This free event begins with sign-ups and bib pick-up from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the Crescent Elementary School, 1001 Anderson Drive in Suisun City.

It is open to all ages and abilities who want to participate in a 1-mile or 5K run or walk.

The run will end at noon and features an untimed 1-mile on-campus run or walk, beginning at 9 a.m., and a timed 5K (3.1 miles), beginning at 9:30 a.m., that includes school grounds and city paths.

The 5K will be RFID chip-timed and printed/ online results will be available.

Mother’s Day

Artisan Fair returns to waterfront

The Suisun Waterfront District will play host to the 12th Annual Mother’s Day Artisan Fair from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.

Bring Mom down for some shopping and food with more than 70 talented artists and artisans featuring handcrafted items and specialty foods. Champagne and mimosas in a commemorative Mother’s Day glass are available for $10 all day.

For more information, go to suisunwaterfront.com.

Government meetings on week’s calendar

Government meetings will be held this week online and in person.

T he meetings will include:

n Travis Unified School District Governing Board,

5 p.m. Tuesday for closed session and 5:30 p.m. for open session, Travis Edu-

cation Center, 2775 De Ronde Drive, Fairfield. Info: https://simbli. eboarcom/sb_meetings/sb_meetinglisting. aspx?s=36030187.

n Vacaville City Council, 6 p.m. Tuesday, council chamber, 650 Merchant St. Info: ci.vacaville.ca.us.

n Rio Vista Planning Commission, 6 p.m. Wednesday, 701 Civic Center Blvd. Info: www.riovistacity. com/citycouncil/page/ meeting-agenda-attachments-minutes-video.

n Solano County Board of Education, 6 p.m. Wednesday, Solano County Office of Education, 5100 Business Center Drive, Fairfield. Info: www.solanocoe.net.

n Solano Transportation Authority Board, 6 p.m. Wednesday, STA Board Room chamber, 423 Main St., Suisun City. Info: www.sta.ca.gov.

n Solano County Civil Service Commission, 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, County Government Center, 675 Texas St., Fairfield. Info: www. solanocounty.com/depts/ bos/meetings/videos.asp.

n Solano County Airport Land Use Commission, 7 p.m. Thursday, 675 Texas St., Fairfield. Info: solanocounty.com/depts/ rm/boardscommissions/ solano_county_airport_ land_use_commission/ agendas.asp.

James H. Henry

James H. Henry, affectionately called “Jimbo”, was born in Williamston, North Carolina. He and his 3 siblings, one sister and two brothers, were raised in The Bronx, New York. After graduating from high school in 1951, he enlisted in the United States Air Force.

Upon completing basic training, James received the rank of Airman and was stationed at Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tuscon, Arizona. He met Emilie Spearman in 1954, and they were married on August 14, 1955.

From 1955-1966, James was stationed at Plattsburgh Air Force Base in upstate New York and held the rank of Staff Sergeant. From 1966-1969, he was stationed at Charleston Air Force Base, South Carolina in the position of Crew Chief and rank of Tech Sergeant. From 1969-1974, James was stationed at RAF Mildenhall in the United Kingdom and obtained the rank of Master Sergeant

In 1974, James was assigned to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, where he was stationed for several years. He moved to Vacaville, California in 1981 and retired from the Air Force in 1986.

After retiring from the Air Force, James and Emilie divorced in 1987. He became involved with several bowling leagues at Travis Bowl and Stars

in Vacaville (now Bowlero), and he also bowled in tournaments in Las Vegas and Reno. James was very popular in the leagues for his wit and infectious smile, especially at Stars. In addition to bowling, James was an avid and lifelong fan of the New York Mets MLB team, and the New York Giants NFL team. He proudly wore each team’s gear wherever he went, no matter the time of year

James was a member of the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World (I.B.P.O.E. of W) and a member of the Tri-City Elks Lodge for over 30 years, reaching the highest position in the order, The Exalted Ruler. He was an active member of Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Fairfield for many years, where he was also an usher

Several years later, James was employed at H. Glenn Richardson Elementary School in Fairfield as a custodian and crossing guard, not far from where he lived. The staff and children affectionately called him “grandpa,” and there is a mural at the school depicting him in his role as crossing guard.

James made his transition on April 5, 2023. He is survived by his sons James, David and Donald, his daughter Danette, ex-wife Emilie, granddaughters Arica Henry, Amanda Hurd, Tonya Henry, and grandsons Elias Garcia, Donald Henry Jr., Geoffrey Henry, Darnell Bailey, Brandon Bailey and Olan Bailey. In addition, he is also survived by 10 great-grandchildren, one great-great granddaughter, and nephews Duane Henry and Christopher Henry.

Children enjoy the rides at the Dixon May Fair, May 11, 2018.

A dog sculpture planter offered for sale by Car Parts Art at the Mother’s Day Artisan Fair held at Harbor Plaza, in Suisun City, May 10, 2015.

Robinson Kuntz/Daily Republic file (2012)

Volunteers Marge Elliot, center, and Julie Bedell, right, walk through a large bird enclosure, while attempting to get a rescued seagull to fly, at the International Bird Rescue.

Robinson Kuntz/Daily Republic file (2018)

The old Solano County Courthouse.

Carlson exits stage right

Tucker Carlson is gone! Before he reemerges on some billionaire’s TV station, or more likely, Russia Today (RT), let’s celebrate. Good for the USA.

A gifted demagogue, Carlson will someday fade away, just as his predecessors did: Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly.

Why was he fired suddenly? It appears that Fox executives were unaware of Carlson’s insults and criticisms of Murdoch and themselves until the last minute. The lies didn’t bother Old Rupert, but he didn’t want those criticisms to come out at trial.

Carlson was fired the next day.

The damage that Fox and its many imitators have visited on our fair country is incalculable. For more than two centuries, America was always noted as an optimistic nation. People were generally happy and worked to make things better.

We’re no longer optimistic. Volunteerism to traditional service organizations that try to contribute uplift to communities has collapsed. People snarl at one another talking politics. I sense that joke-telling is much less than in my youth. No one whistles anymore.

How can you be happy and optimistic about the future when Tucker Carlson, the mostwatched cable commentator says, “This is what the collapse of civilization looks like”? Or, “You are watching the death of the future of our country.” This is crazy stuff. But Carlson has that priceless “nice fellow next door” quality.

Let’s look at a typical Carlson show that I reconstruct in my head. He has two prominent themes: masculinity and conspiracies involving “them” against “you.”

He admires “real” men and strength. He worships Vlad Putin of Russia and Victor Orban of Hungary.

He claims there’s “a total collapse of testosterone in American men.” (Tucker, families are still producing babies.)

He claims that there’s a “war on men.” (It’s modernity, Tuck; take a deep breath. Living in cities does favor female strengths: organizing, communicating, planning. But modern business, government and NGOs cry out for talent. So it’s natural that women will do well. There’s room for us all. Inhale.)

In a remarkable speech the day after his firing he made the claim, “Weak leaders (Biden?) cause an angry country.” (This odd claim was based on anger research, right? Wrong.)

His glorification of toxic masculinity hit a peak in one of his special videos which showed some male (him?) naked on a hill reaching heroically skyward. There was some sort of short stone pillar in front of his privates shining red light at that area. We learn that shining infrared light at testicles will somehow set men free! Bizarre? Yes. Tanning testicles just isn’t normal.

He is also obsessed with conspiracies perpetrated by “them” against “us.” This was repeated every night.

Top of the list is his adoption of “The Great Replacement Theory,” discovered by him on the wild 4Chan online bulletin board. (He generated cultural outrage ideas by trolling 4Chan, The Daily [nazi] Stormer and other far-right fantasy purveyors. Then he put them on Fox to a startled audience of mostly older, normal folks.)

This theory states that “elites,” (Democrats), are bringing in non-white immigrants who will replace whites and vote Democratic. (He apparently doesn’t know that since Whites, Blacks, and Asian Americans aren’t replacing themselves we might need someone to fill all the “help wanted” jobs. And Jews certainly aren’t going to replace anyone – they have the lowest birth rate of all. (Hispanics are barely replacing themselves but their birthrate shows the sharpest decline.)

Tucker is a white nationalist, fighting a losing fight against irreversible forces. Even Teddy Roosevelt, noting the declining birthrate of whites in 1902 voiced concern about “race suicide.” It turns out that with education and urban living, birthrates decline throughout the world. Give it up, Tuck.

Then the corollaries. Immigration “drives down wages for low-skilled U.S. workers.” It does not. Countless studies disprove that. I admit that it seems plausible, but it’s false.

But Tuck rages on. “They want to control and then destroy you.” (How does one “destroy” us?)

It’s all crazy stuff.

“People live in a false reality,” he exclaimed to his audience the day after his firing. (Yep, that’s you, Tucker.)

Jack Batson is a former member of the Fairfield City Council. Reach him by email at jsbatson@ prodigy.net.

Letters to the editor

Letters must be 325 words or less and are subject to editing for length and clarity. All letters must include the author’s name, address and phone number. Send letters to Letters to the Editor, the Daily Republic, P.O. Box 47, Fairfield, CA 94533, email to sebastian.onate@ mcnaughton.media or drop them off at our office, 1250 Texas St. in Fairfield.

The USA – the evolution of an idea

America is an idea which evolved over time. We are not a race per se, nor adherents of a particular religion although, foundationally, our moral precepts come from Judeo-Christian heritage. So, we are not bound by ethnicity, religion or ancestry. Instead, we are bound together by a set of universal principals embraced in our Declaration of Independence – “The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” making the radical assertion that “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

America is an amalgam of all humanity. Many had fled their mother counties for various reasons seeking freedom and opportunities denied them. Bearing in mind the Roman Seneca’s admonition, “Valor withers without adversity,” over the colonial period these people evolved creating their own ways of governing under British rule. The colonial time was gestational for a new kind of person propagating self-reliance fostered by necessity, which became firm belief.

This mindset carried us Americans through a tumultuous 247-year history. We started in 1776 with our Declaration. We then tried the Articles of Confederation, which proved inadequate. We replaced this in 1789 with our Constitution, better describing and codifying the principles embodied within those documents creating federalism but most importantly clearly stated the constraints and responsibilities on

THE RIGHT STUFF COMMENTARY

government in our “Bill of Rights.” This document contained something not seen before in making all people and all rulers accountable to “We the People.” We Americans had our greatest universal trauma in our Civil War 1860-65. Today, many on the left delight in pointing out our failure to address the scourge of slavery at our founding. The reality is, America would never have come into being had it been addressed as Jefferson and others originally wanted in 1775. Some 90 years later, after five bloody years of war, more than 800,000 Americans died ending slavery. We are still dealing with the aftermath. We went through the period called Manifest Destiny. As the newspaperman Horace Greely said: “Go West, young man.” We did eventually create our continent-spanning nation. We spread the concept of freedom and liberty however imperfectly. We went through two World Wars, Vietnam and a so-called “Cold War,” losing hundreds of thousands more to promote freedom and ensure that concepts of “liberty for all” did not perish from this earth.

The Civil Rights movement really started with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, leading to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. This was not enough but eventually we were blessed to have a man, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., come forth metaphorically holding up a mirror to us all. The result of this struggle purged “Jim Crow” and other legal ves-

tiges of segregation from our laws, thus taking us closer to the America described in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

We have gone through the moon landings and continued space explorations. We have advances in medical science from stem cell therapy to technology with cellphones, the internet, artificial intelligence and other discoveries.

America enjoyed the Reagan revolution, which challenged and beat back ideas foreign to our nature. The economy roared. Communism was defeated. Prosperity returned and peace through strength prevailed. Faith in America returned.

Yet, once again, forces of despair, spawned by alleged intellectual elites within our so-called “progressive” political and education systems, eroded faith in our nation’s greatness. The foolish ideas of globalism, political correctness and disparaging America’s culture reigned.

Donald Trump was surprisingly elected then vigorously opposed, indeed sabotaged, despite many positive accomplishments. Currently, President Biden has wrecked our border security, inflation exploded and foreign affairs are severely compromised. Wokeism, identity politics within schools, workplaces and media abound.

Evil has been overcome before and it will be again.

Jim McCully is the former chairman of the Solano County Republican Central Committee, Vacaville resident, and former Northwest Regional Vice Chairman of the California State Republican Party.

Labor market trends are now the Fed’s friend

Jonathan Levin BLOOMBERG OPINION

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell claimed this week that the U.S. labor market remains “very tight,” and a government report Friday showing that employers added a better-than-forecast 253,000 non-farm jobs in April appeared to validate that view.

But downward revisions to the February and March data suggest a broad cooling trend remains intact. This poses somewhat of a dilemma for policymakers in their effort to get inflation back under control: Continue to raise interest rates and risk pushing the economy into recession or pause and risk allowing inflation to remain elevated. At this moment, the latter is the better option.

Although the gains in April pushed the unemployment rate back down to just 3.4%, near the lowest since the 1960s, some of the under-thehood numbers – specifically, the underlying trend in private payroll growth – corroborate a clear slowdown that’s well underway. With Friday’s revisions for February and March data, the numbers now show the U.S. added an average of 182,000 private-sector jobs in the past three months, the fewest since January 2021. More important, the average has returned to the prepandemic “normal.” That may not be weak enough for policymakers in inflation-fighting mode, but it’s a stretch to classify it as “tight.”

The Labor Department report comes just days after the Fed raised its target interest rate for overnight loans between banks by an additional 25 basis points to a range of 5% to 5.25%, matching the highest policy rate since 2001. While infla-

tion has proved more stubborn than many expected, policymakers believe that it will decelerate in the latter half of the year as the “long and variable” lags of their rapid-fire monetary tightening bite. Meanwhile, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank in rapid succession have added uncertainty around the economic outlook as traders wonder how many more banks may fail and whether it will lead to much tighter credit.

Already, the deceleration in job growth looks broad-based, with average gains the weakest since 2021 in construction, manufacturing, leisure and hospitality and other services. There have been some intriguing little bounces in information and financial activities employment in the most recent few reports, but they could just be blips. Overall, the trend across the economy is toward moderation, and there’s no need for policymakers to push harder, lest the slowdown become a collapse. The one clear exception is perhaps health services – which is still adding jobs at a fairly brisk pace – but that sector is contending with a structural worker shortage that was exacerbated by the pandemic. The concern about the “tight” labor market comes from arguably antiquated Phillips curve logic that has dominated central bank decisions for decades. As the thinking goes, a strong labor market leads to higher wage costs for businesses, which offset them by raising consumer prices, feeding faster and faster inflation. When inflation rates rise, central bankers typically respond, in part, by implementing tighter monetary policy in the hopes of increasing unemployment – despite the often catastrophic collateral damage to

workers and mixed evidence that inflation actually works in the real world like it does in the model.

Ultimately, policymakers have very little sense of how much labor market “loosening” is necessary to tame inflation, and they are feeling their way around in the dark. As Powell put it in his news conference Wednesday, he thinks that underlying wage increases of around 5% are probably too high and that 3% “is probably closer to where they need to be.” But that’s really a guess.

Somewhat refreshingly, Powell was also quick to acknowledge the considerable uncertainty around these assumptions. Here’s how he put it in his news conference on Wednesday:

“... wages and prices tend to move together. And it’s very hard to say what’s causing what. But, you know, I’ve never said that, you know, that it – that wages are really the principal driver because I don’t think that’s really right.”

That’s good to hear, but he also needs to put that inherent skepticism into practice. The Fed made the right move earlier this week by signaling an openness to pause rate increases at future meetings if the data permit. The jobs numbers over recent months do just that, showing that the labor market is cooling at a moderate pace and will probably continue to do so. The trend is the Fed’s friend, and with myriad other risks bubbling up across the economy, there’s no need to hurry the process along.

Jonathan Levin has worked as a Bloomberg journalist in Latin America and the U.S., covering finance, markets and M&A. Most recently, he has served as the company’s Miami bureau chief. He is a CFA charterholder

Jim McCully

Jack Batson

and popcorn popped. We look forward to meeting you and providing you with excellent customer service.

(707) 427-1386

Amid rumors of Kevin Costner exit, ‘Yellowstone’ will end later this year

Los A ngeLes Times

After weeks of speculation about the future of the blockbuster series, including reports of behind-the-scenes drama and a PaleyFest no-show, it’s official: “Yellowstone” will conclude with its current fifth season, Paramount announced Friday.

The second half of the fifth season of the series, which stars Kevin Costner as John Dutton, the head of the largest cattle ranch in the country, will premiere in November. The company also announced Friday that an untitled sequel series will premiere in December on Paramount Network and stream on Paramount+ – unlike “Yellowstone” proper, which streams on Peacock.

The new show will continue the story of

the Dutton family with an as-yet-unannounced cast. The news comes on the heels of reports that Costner would not return to the series after Season 5, as well as news that the Oscar-winning actor and his wife of 18 years, Christine Baumgartner, were getting divorced.

Asked if Costner’s involvement in the franchise would continue beyond “Yellowstone” Season 5, a Paramount spokesperson declined to comment. The spokesperson also declined to comment on reports that Matthew McConaughey has been tapped to star in the sequel.

“Kevin Costner is a big part of ‘Yellowstone’ and we hope that’s the case for a long time to come,” the company said in a statement to the L.A. Times in February.

Pickles Brian Crane

Zits Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman

Pearls Before Swine Stephan Pastis

Candorville Darrin Bell

Baby Blues Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott

Baldo Hector Cantú

Columns&Games

Dear Annie: My husband “Jack” has become so angry with me lately, and I don’t understand why. We have been married for 10 years, have two beautiful girls, ages 6 and 4, and he’s a great dad. However, with me, he is short-tempered and does not want to spend any “alone” time with me when I suggest we have date nights. Jack refuses to discuss what’s wrong when I ask him why the sudden change in his temperament toward me. I am a stay-at-home mom and consider myself a good wife and mother, and don’t deserve to be made to feel badly about myself with his outbursts of anger, from things like not making dinner on time, to my “sloppy” appearance, to not stocking his favorite beer and snacks. I can’t take it anymore. —

Fed Up to Here

Dear Fed Up: Jack has no right to be verbally abusive toward you. You two should get into couples therapy, pronto. He sounds like he may be struggling with depression or anger – or worse – and he needs to find healthy ways to cope. If he refuses to participate in therapy, he can learn to stock

his own beer while you consider the next best move for you and your girls – with or without him in the picture.

Dear Annie: My best friend is dating a nice guy, “George” (not his real name), and they seem madly in love and want to get married after graduation. We are all college students and George is an international student from South America.

One night we went out with some friends from class at a bar/restaurant. When my best friend and I got up to go to the ladies room, some friends came over to the table, and I overheard George telling them about a date he was on the night before with another girl he met online!

I am so angry at his betrayal. Do I tell my best friend? Or is it none of my business? — Keeping Secrets

Dear Keeping: You should absolutely tell your best friend what you overheard her boyfriend saying. The fact they’ve already discussed getting married (and soon) and that he’s dating other women clearly shows they are on two very different pages. Save her the agony and headache now,

Crossword

before she wastes any more of her time with him, thinking he’s a good guy when he’s not.

Dear Annie: I was doing some spring cleaning and found some receipts in the pockets of one of my husband’s sports coats for some large purchases for his sports memorabilia collection, to the tune of $5,000 to $20,000 each. I was in shock. I don’t have a problem with supporting him and his hobbies, but he should have discussed it with me first, correct? What should I do? — Dumbfounded

Dear Dumbfounded: You sound very generous and supportive. Start by having an open, honest conversation with your husband and explain how strongly you feel about not keeping secrets. Maybe the two of you can figure out why he felt the need to hide his receipts to begin with. Maybe he’s never consulted you before about large purchases and didn’t think it was important to do so. It could be that he has an addiction and needs help for his compulsion. Getting it out in the open now will make things much smoother when he finds the next item to add to his collection.

Send your questions for Annie Lane to dearannie@ creators.com.

ARIES (March 21-April 19).

When things don’t go according to your plan, it doesn’t mean they will be worse. Life is showing you how to grow. You’ll keep an open mind and look out for opportunity.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20).

There have been times you were so concentrated on surviving, it would have been unwise to focus on anything else. Now you have the chance to aim for new goals and work toward your dreams. Ask the muses to help you see the potential in things.

GEMINI (May 21-June 21).

You’ll get the sense that fate is neither for nor against you – a liberation, really. Since there is nothing predetermined about today’s plot, everything will spring from your intentions and your actions, which are pure and direct.

CANCER (June 22-July 22).

The fastest way to expand your horizons is to broaden your network. A diverse group of people in your life can provide you with a variety of perspectives, experiences and opportunities you might not have access to otherwise.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22). You make sacrifices and support your loved ones through the ups and downs. You deserve the same. Only start new relationships with those who have qualities that make a fulfilling relationship possible,

Today’s birthday

It’s so easy to say yes to you that you’ll hear it all the time this year. Pose your questions accordingly! Just when you think you’ve felt all the feelings, something new washes over you inspired by a special someone. More highlights: Money you’ve waited for will finally arrive. A training leads to surprising professional developments. Documents that will give you freedom. Aries and Sagittarius adore you. Your lucky numbers are: 4, 5, 3, 33 and 20.

like kindness, empathy and shared values.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22).

The conflict within a relationship or group will heal the way all wounds do – on their own, within circumstances that are conducive to healing. In this case, nothing radical or forced will be necessary. Eliminate disharmony.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 23). If you never felt inadequate, you wouldn’t push yourself so hard to succeed. Your internal world isn’t always comfortable, but the discomfort can prompt critical thinking and ultimately set you up for a better life.

SCORPIO (Oct. 24-Nov. 21).

Your body is telling you what

it needs; the obvious things mostly, like getting enough sleep and stretching, but it’s about something else, too. Tune into the wisdom of physicality and everything gets better.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22Dec. 21). You’ve a sense that something important is happening. Knowing how memory serves each person differently, get things in writing, take pictures and document events in as many ways as you can.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22Jan. 19). You’ll have an opportunity to learn from someone with a different skill set or advanced knowledge in the area you most want to develop. The best part is, it’s free... for now.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20Feb. 18). You’ve made many efforts for others, and while it’s good to be needed, a temporary break from the pressure will benefit you. If the give-and-take is out of balance, the break will help restore a relationship’s equilibrium.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20). In many ways, you’re in a strange, new territory. A routine, a sense of order and a handful of predictable outcomes will provide security. You’re in a position to choose what will and won’t be part of your daily grove.

Write Holiday Mathis at HolidayMathis.com.

Bridge

by Phillip Alder

but with careful planning you may leave him with no option.

Playing in three no-trump, you receive the club jack lead from West. After East puts up the king – in case his partner has led from a suit headed by the A-J-10 – how should you continue?

As always, start by counting those top tricks. There are eight: two hearts, four diamonds and two clubs. The hunt is on for a ninth. There are two obvious chances. You could play a spade to the king, hoping East has the ace, or you could guess who has the heart queen. (It would be normal to assume East, because West seems to have extra length in clubs.) However, experts hate to guess; they prefer sure things. Here, as you have no doubt deduced, you have a chance at a sure thing.

THINE ENEMIES CAN COME TO THY SUCCOR

William Blake wrote to his patron, William Hayley, “Thy friendship oft has made my heart ache: Do be my enemy –for friendship’s sake.”

There are bridge deals like this, on which you enlist an enemy – an opponent – to help your cause. Of course, he isn’t going to do it willingly,

After winning with the club ace, play off three rounds of diamonds. Then lead a club to the queen. When East follows, exit with your last club. While West cashes three winners in the suit, discard two spades from the dummy and a spade and a diamond from your hand. (This is why you couldn’t cash all four diamond tricks earlier. Your hand would be squeezed.) Now West must lead a major, furnishing your ninth trick. After the deal, don’t expect West’s friendship to gush like the blushful Hippocrene.

COPYRIGHT: 2023, UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE

Sudoku by Wayne Gould

5/8/23

Fill

grid contains the digits 1 through 9, with no repeats. That means that no number is repeated in any row, column or box. Solution, tips and computer program at www.sudoku.com

Difficulty level: BRONZE

Solution to 5/6/23:

My husband doesn’t want to spend any ‘alone’ time with me

Horoscopes by Holiday Mathis

Word Sleuth Daily Cryptoquotes

Annie Lane

Dear Annie

Fire

of the valley. The edge of the break abuts the back of Rossi’s home.

He knows it is not a guarantee and that a wildfire could still reach his home.

“But it buys some time to get out, and it buys the fire department ... more time to get in and stop it,” he said.

Also part of the initial phase is a 20- to 25-acre break on the ridgetop, on property owned by Frank Lindemann.

Close to 10 acres of the ridge break have been completed by CalFire crews using its giant masticator, a piece of equipment with metal teeth that essentially chews through the woody and brush material. The rest will likely have to be done by hand crews,. Carpenter said he would have loved to have CalFire available to do all the fire break work, but that was not possible. So a contractor, Aeri, was hired to do some of the work as well.

The contract work, as well as an ATV, excavator and a smaller masticator head were purchased with a $950,000 grant awarded by CalFire.

Rochelle Sherlock, who spearheaded the formation of the fire safe council in 2019, wrote the grant in the spring of 2021. Originally, it was a request for $1.5 million, but with guidance from CalFire, was divided into three phases.

She said the target for the second grant is around $600,000, while the target for phase three is about $750,000.

“They liked the project and it is a high priority for them ... and they were in agreement with the Cordelia fire district to start on the west side because of the dense vegetation and because of the westerly afternoon winds,” Sherlock said.

In fact, Carpenter adds, the state fire agency was already doing fire break work in the area dating back to 2016.

“We just picked up where they left off ... and added to it,” Carpenter said.

Except it was not as easy as just getting the dollars and starting the work.

A Vegetation Treatment Plan – a kind of environmental quality review – had to be developed. It included the trees to be removed and the spacing involved, as well as safeguarding waterways and sensitive habitats. Possible archeological values also had to be protected.

The grant was awarded in February 2022. Work, in increments of essentially 30-day operational periods, started a year later, with funding dis-

In brief

tributed as each new operational period started.

The fire break runs from the top of Mason Road across to McCreedy Court, Carpenter said. He called the area, from a firefighting perspective, a nightmare.

He said the ridgetop break is more tactical in nature, with the goal of being able to get crews there to keep the fires coming from Napa County from ever reaching Green Valley.

The second phase picks up where the first-phase break ends and heads over to the Vallejo Water Treatment Plant, encircling that facility and cutting north from there.

“We also hope to loop down Rockville Road down to Suisun Valley Road,” said Carpenter, describing the third phase.

A sliver of the Suisun Fire Protection District is also part of the work map, which brings that agency, along with Vallejo, the Solano Land Trust and Fairfield into the partnership circle. The Cordelia Cattle Company is also involved.

“And all those partners have been a part since 2021,” Sherlock said.

The other part of the umbrella project is getting area residents to improve their individual properties. To that end, the fire district has visited more than 450 properties to assess the conditions and recommend what needs to be done.

Schechtman said he has always tried to build defensible spaces into his 10 acres, but said he has done a great deal more since the fire council got involved.

That involvement included events to help clear away debris and chipping days to help do the work. In some cases, volunteers have stepped up to help those property owners who cannot do the work on their own.

“There’s been a tremendous amount of work that has been done to remove the fire hazards,” Schechtman said.

He said he and others have “hardened” their homes. One way is to change out house vents to a style that helps prevent embers from getting into the attic. Placing tile on the inside of the vents also lessens the risk of fire if an ember does get through.

The type of landscaping and other materials can help, too.

Watch the fire break being built

To see CalFire working to build the shaded fire break, watch the video at https://gvfsc.org.

County transportation, land use panel meets May 17

FAIRFIELD — The Solano County Land Use and Transportation Committee has scheduled its next meeting for May 17. The agenda has not yet been released. The committee meets at 11 a.m. in Conference Room 6003 on the sixth floor of the county government center, 675 Texas St. in Fairfield.

Airport Land Use panel meets Thursday

FAIRFIELD — The proposed Travis Reserve Area Overlay Zone will be considered by the Solano County Airport Land Use Commission when it meets Thursday. The commissioners meet in the Board of Supervisors chamber on the first floor of the county government center, 675 Texas St. in Fairfield.

From

was the 22nd mass murder — four or more people killed in a single incident — in the United States this year, according to data compiled by USA Today, The Associated Press and Northeastern University.

It was one of 199 mass shootings this year tracked by the Gun Violence Archive, which defines such incidents as four or more people killed or injured, not including the shooter.

The Allen mass shooting was the second-deadliest to take place in the United States this year, behind a Jan. 21 shooting at a Monterey Park, California, ballroom that killed 11 plus the shooter.

Just after 3:30 p.m., Allen police said an officer who was nearby on an unrelated call heard gunfire at the mall in the 800 block of West Stacy Road, near U.S. Highway 75.

According to police, the officer “engaged the suspect and neutralized the threat” and then called for emergency responders.

The shooter, who police said acted alone, was one of seven people declared dead on the scene. Two others died at a hospital.

Policy

From Page One

be determined. In the meantime, the federal government plans to restrict asylum eligibility and ramp up speedy deportations once the pandemic policy goes away.

“Our model is as follows: Build lawful pathways, give individuals an opportunity to reach the United States, safely, in an orderly way,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said last month. “And then deliver a consequence for those who do not avail themselves.”

Title 42, and the restrictionist policies that came before it, has created a backlog of waiting asylum seekers in northern Mexico. Knowing this backlog could lead to an increase in border crossings, the Biden administration is following a longtime border strategy used by Democratic and Republican administrations to try to stop people from crossing.

Among the plans, the administration will still require smartphone appointments to request asylum, a controversial move that is likely to be challenged in court and that echoes many of the decisions made by former President Trump.

“These policies are created to slow and stop migration because they don’t want people to come – not to make a more perfect system,” said Nicole Ramos, an attorney and director of Al Otro Lado’s Border Rights Project.

The risks to waiting migrants – and to those sent back without fully considering their protection requests –can be deadly.

Many mothers the San Diego Union-Tribune has spoken with are stuck in dangerous situations while waiting for appointments in Mexico through the CBP One smartphone app, which has been rife with problems.

One woman said her family had already been threatened where they were hiding, and the people housing them no longer wanted to help. She said her only family members who haven’t been killed are in the United States, and she has nowhere else to go. This article isn’t identifying her or the other women because of their vulnerable situations.

After Title 42

Title 42 managed to do what many other policies couldn’t – cut off access to asylum for thousands of people who had fled their homes. With that precedent set, it has opened the door for the Biden administration to bolster its

Law enforcement works the scene on the day after a shooting at Allen

Premium Outlets, in Allen, Texas, Sunday.

”Our hearts are with the individuals and families impacted by this tragic event,” Allen police wrote in a tweet.

At least three of the seven surviving patients taken to local hospitals remained in critical condition as of Sunday afternoon, according to a Medical City Healthcare statement.

The three patients listed in critical condition were being treated at Medical City McKinney. A fourth patient also being treated at the hospital was listed in “fair condition.” Two others patients were listed in

deterrence strategy.

“We’ve had the right to asylum since 1980, and this is the first time it was massively stopped in a formal way,” said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America. “It’s the first time we massively denied protection to people who needed it on this scale since World War II. We don’t really know the full human cost of that.”

Human Rights First documented more than 13,400 violent attacks on asylum seekers stuck waiting in Mexico because of Title 42 during the Biden administration’s first two years in office.

As the policy goes away, some of the vestiges remain. That includes requiring asylum seekers to use the smartphone app to request asylum by appointment at ports of entry.

Administration officials are also working to finalize a rule that would largely make migrants ineligible for asylum if they enter the U.S. without permission or come to a port of entry without an appointment and fail to apply for protection in another country on the way.

B eginning Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security said it will rely significantly on “expedited removal,” a fast-track process to preliminarily assess migrants’ requests for protection while they wait in Border Patrol custody and deport those who don’t qualify within days or a few weeks.

Mexico has agreed to accept some deported migrants who are not Mexican, though the specifics remain unclear. Unlike expulsions, those deportations will come with heavy consequences – five-year bans on returning to the United States and possible criminal prosecution – but could appear to migrants like little has changed.

“If Mexico does agree to take back deported people at the sort of rate or variety of countries that they already are, then it’s not going to look too different from the present day,” Isacson said.

These plans echo several Trump administration policies. The former administration similarly restricted the number of asylum seekers who could cross at ports of entry each day. It held asylum seekers in Border Patrol stations until their asylum claims could be reviewed, resulting in more denials than usual in the early stages of the process.

It also tried to make those who crossed the border without permission ineligible for asylum, as well as those who passed through other countries between the country they fled and the United States. Under the

fair condition with one being treated at Medical City Plano and the other at Medical City Children’s Hospital. It wasn’t immediately clear what hospital the final patient was being treated at and what their condition was as of Sunday afternoon.

Some mourners gathered at the mall Sunday to reflect on the shooting and pay tribute to the victims. Hannah Dunegan, 19, described the shooting as “one of those situations when you think is never going to happen in your hometown.”

latter policy, human rights observers documented cases of Cameroonian asylum seekers who were deported by the U.S. and subjected to torture and other violence because they had been disqualified from protection.

Other developments also resemble the former president’s tactics.

On Tuesday, the Department of Defense announced that it would send 1,500 active-duty troops to help border agents fill “capability gaps.” In 2018, Trump sent 5,800 troops to the border amid the arrival of a caravan of thousands of migrants from Central America.

In initial talks with the Trump administration, Mexican officials reportedly refused to accept deportations of non-Mexicans. With the precedent of Title 42 expulsions, the Biden administration has been able to get its neighbor to sign on.

Unlike the Trump administration, the Biden White House has promised to create more options for people in the hemisphere to come to the United States without requesting asylum at the border.

“It’s been a mixed bag of really big sticks and a number of carrots that this administration is trying to plant and whack at the same time,” said Angela Kelley, a policy advisor to the American Immigration Council and the American Immigration Lawyers Assn.

There are fewer carrots than sticks.

One component allows certain citizens of Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba to apply for temporary entry. More than 95,000 people from those countries arrived from October through April, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Another program, still in the works, will reunite families from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Colombia who have pending green card petitions.

U.S. officials are also establishing refugee processing centers in Guatemala and Colombia, but officials noted last month that it would be “weeks” before the first two centers open.

Senior administration officials sent a memo Friday to White House staff, urging Republicans to stop “pushing a MAGA agenda of chaos” and hammering home the argument that the administration plan is “rooted in enforcement, deterrence and diplomacy.”

A legacy of deterrence

The asylum system was created by the Refugee Act of 1980, which codified the obligations that the United States had agreed to after the Holocaust in meetings with

the United Nations. It promised protection to people who could show they faced persecution in their home countries on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group, such as the LGBTQ+ community.

The key to accessing the system is getting to U.S. soil.

Though the United States has a long history of turning away migrants – including Jewish people during the Holocaust – many human rights observers say the current deterrence strategy for asylum seekers ramped up throughout recent presidential administrations.

Under former President Clinton, the federal government first put into writing the practice of “prevention through deterrence.” The idea was to make getting to and across the border so difficult and painful that people decided to stay away.

While Clinton and former President George W. Bush made crossing the border more difficult, it was under former President Obama that the federal government began restricting access to the asylum system with policies that cut off access to U.S. soil.

Partway through Obama’s second term, the number of people seeking asylum at the border –particularly families and children – increased.

Isacson, who has worked on human rights issues related to Latin America for nearly three decades, recalled that was when he first heard critics referring to the asylum system as a “loophole” or “scam.”

When large numbers of Haitians arrived in Tijuana in 2016, the U.S. government in coordination with Mexican officials implemented an appointment system at ports of entry for the first time.

That practice of turning asylum seekers away at ports of entry grew under Trump as the metering program restricted how many of them officials could process on a given day, leading to monthslong waits along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Trump administration implemented “Remain in Mexico” in 2019, which obligated asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for the duration of their U.S. immigration court proceedings, further eroding their access to U.S. soil.

Then came Title 42. Now the Biden administration seeks to continue the trend.

“The difference is in the rhetoric, and that’s basically it,” said Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S.-Mexico Border Program.

Stewart F. House/Getty Images/TNS

Who should choose a successor if a California senator resigns: Newsom or voters?

Tribune ConTenT AgenCy

WASHINGTON —

Should California hold a special election to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy, instead of having Gov. Gavin Newsom appoint someone to fill the seat?

Some states leave the choice of a successor to voters and a California congressman is pushing to have all states proceed that way.

One downside of special elections is that they are expensive. The unsuccessful effort to recall Newsom in 2021 cost California an estimated $276 million.

And because turnout would likely be low – meaning that highly motivated activists would be more likely to vote – the chances of a political novice or a Republican winning in California would increase.

“I don’t think a Republican could win a Senate race in California, but a special election might crack open the door ever so slightly in the way a regularly-scheduled election might not,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan political site.

Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican, won a 2010 special election in Massachusetts to succeed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, the Democrat who held the seat for 47 years.

Brown lost the general election three years later to Democrat Elizabeth Warren. He’s the only Republican to serve in the Senate from Massachusetts since 1979. California last elected a Republican senator in 1988.

In a closely divided Senate like the current one – split 50-50 last year and Democrats now with 51 of the 100 seats – a gubernatorial appointment could be a game changer.

“The evenly split Senate means that even a single

governor could, hypothetically, determine which party controls the chamber,” said a report from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center last year.

Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin, argues “Gubernatorial appointments are a vestige of a bygone era that has disenfranchised millions of Americans and been subject to repeated abuse.”

Kiley has proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution requiring special elections in case of a vacancy. The Constitution’s 17th amendment, which provides for direct election of U.S. senators (prior to that state legislatures chose) also allows a temporary appointment if there’s a vacancy. How that seat is filled is up to the states.

In 37 states, including California, governors make interim appointments to the Senate, and the new incumbent serves until the next general election, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The other 13 have special elections to fill the seat as soon as possible. In some cases the governor can name someone to serve in the interim.

States have tried to move in both directions

in recent years. Utah and North Dakota have made it easier to hold special elections.

Others have tinkered with the appointment process. Maryland and Kentucky now require an appointee to be of the same political party as the departing senator, joining five other states.

When Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, took office in January 2021, Newsom appointed Alex Padilla, then the California secretary of state. Padilla then was on the ballot twice last year, once to fill Harris’ unexpired term and then for a sixyear term of his own. He easily won both elections. Other states usually hold a special election as soon as possible.

The Senate currently has one appointed member who has not stood for election, Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Nebraska. He was named in January when incumbent Sen. Ben Sasse resigned to become president of University of Florida.

Ricketts, a former Nebraska governor, would have to run in 2024 to fill the last two years of Sasse’s term. He was appointed by his successor, Jim Pillen.

Eleven other current U.S. senators were first

appointed to the job and then won elections. Two appointed senators, Martha McSally, R-Ariz., and Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., lost in 2020.

Newsom has said that if a vacancy occurs, he will name a Black woman to the seat. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, is currently seeking to succeed Feinstein when the senator’s term ends in 2025. Among those also vying are Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff of Los Angeles and Katie Porter of Orange County.

Kiley’s idea has been proposed before. In 2009, the Senate’s Constitution subcommittee backed the plan after a hearing, but it went nowhere.

Even if Kiley’s plan gained momentum, it’s highly doubtful it could take effect before 2024, when California voters will choose a senator to serve a six-year term.

Amending the Constitution takes time. The last amendment, ratified in 1992, said any pay raises Congress voted itself were only effective after the next election. It was the first to be added since 1971 when the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18. Usually, Congress must approve an amendment by a two-thirds majority, and the measure would need the approval of the legislatures of 38 states.

Congress can also call a constitutional convention if two-thirds of the states approve. Feinstein is expected to return to the Senate soon, though no timetable has been set.

Though four House Democrats and dozens of California liberal groups have urged her to resign, no senator has done so. Almost all have expressed hope that she will return soon, as she said she plans to do.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas,

Military given deadline to implement Brandon Act, aiming to help service members seek mental health care

Tribune ConTenT AgenCy

The Department of Defense released implementation guidelines Friday for the Brandon Act, legislation that will allow service members to seek mental health treatment confidentially.

The policy directs the services to establish policy, assign responsibilities, and provide procedures for service members to request a referral for a mental health evaluation through a commanding officer or supervisor. The process allows service members to seek help confidentially for any reason, at any time, and in any environment — in the hope that would prevent the stigma associated with seeking such treatment.

Each service has 45 days to implement the policy for active-duty members. There will be a longer process for nonactive-duty members.

The signing of the Brandon Act marks a milestone in a three-year battle by Patrick and Teri Caserta. The couple championed the act after their son, Brandon Caserta, died by suicide in 2018.

The Petty Officer

3rd Class was serving a helicopter sea combat unit when he died in June 2018 at Naval Station Norfolk. In letters to his parents and to his friends, Caserta said he was constantly hazed and bullied in the Navy, and saw no other way out.

President Joe Biden signed the Brandon Act into law as part of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. But enforcement and implementation requirements were not included in the bill, leaving it up to the Department of Defense to work the legislation into its policies at its leisure.

“We cannot believe it took this long to pass and implement a bill that will saves lives. We watched the suicide numbers go up every year since Brandon’s death in 2018 which was extremely hard knowing the devastation of each family it affected,” Teri Caserta said in an emailed statement.

There was renewed push for the implementation of the Brandon Act after Hampton Roadsbased Navy installations reported seven sailors died by suicide last year, contributing to 328 activeduty suicides total.

Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee/TNS file Gov. Gavin Newsom would name a replacement if Sen. Dianne Feinstein steps down. But should voters make that choice?

Gary C. Knapp/Getty Images/TNS file The aircraft carrier USS George Washington makes its way up the Elizabeth River through the rain and fog to its home port Dec. 20, 2002, in Norfolk, Virginia.

Giants’ win streak snapped at four games in loss to Brewers

Jerry Mcdonald BAY AREA NEWS GROUP

SAN FRANCISCO — A temporary speed bump or have the Giants thrown it into reverse again?

A four-game winstreak ended Sunday with a 7-3 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers before a crowd of 34,603 at Oracle Park. It ended a streak for the Brewers as well, who had lost five in a row.

The Giants open a three-game series against the Washington Nationals Monday night hoping

to prove they aren’t as streaky as they seem.

The four-game win streak was preceded by a fourgame losing streak, which began after a five-game win streak.

Manager Gabe Kapler said before the game the season wasn’t far enough long to characterize the Giants (15-18) one way or the other.

“It’s a little early to describe our team,”

Kapler said. “Baseball is such a long season. You’re going to win a couple in a row, back and forth. I don’t

think I would characterize our team as anything after five weeks.”

Milwaukee (19-15) got two-run home runs from William Contreras (his first) in the second inning and Willy Adames (his sixth) in the fifth against Giants starter and loser Ross Stripling (0-2).

In the eighth, the Giants had runners on second and third and one out against Peter Strzelecki, courtesy of a Wilmer Flores single and a Blake Sabol double. Strzelecki,

however, struck out both pinch hitter J.D. Davis and Brett Wisely to end the threat.

Thairo Estrada hit a solo home run in the ninth for the Giants, his sixth of the season.

The Giants scored twice off starter Adrian Houser, who was making his first start of the season after coming off the injured list with a groin injury. They both came in the second inning on run-scoring singles from Wisely and LaMonte Wade Jr.

Houser got the first two

There’s more than a playoff series on the line –Warriors vs. Lakers is about bragging rights

dieter Kurtenbach

BAY AREA NEWS GROUP

The Golden State Warriors have many rivals. That’s the price of greatness on the court.

But off the court, Warriors fans have two arch-nemeses, and in recent years, they have ganged up to form a juggernaut of insufferableness.

I’m speaking, of course, about Lakers fans and LeBron James fans.

And now that LeBron and the Lakers are up 2-1 in the teams’ Western Conference Semifinals series, it’s time for the Warriors players to help out the Warriors in

the stands and pull this series even.

Because if the Warriors were to lose this series, it could very well mean the end of the Dubs Dynasty and the ushering in of a new era in San Francisco.

But more importantly: if the Warriors lose, the fans of the blue and gold – and I don’t think I’m exaggerating – would never hear the end of it.

We can’t have that. The Bay has taken enough hits lately.

To be clear: there should be some begrudging respect for Lakers fans, even though

they are mostly corny frontrunners.

You can’t argue with the history, though: Their team is the NBA’s old money – the California constant. You probably know a few Lakers fans here in the Bay. For decades, L.A. won games while the Warriors were a laughingstock. To be a Dubs fan in the ’80s, ’90s, and aughts was to suffer. Not everyone was cut out for that lifestyle.

That dynamic has changed in the last decade. The Warriors are the NBA’s nouveau riche rich – the league’s new most valuable franchise. And the Lakers aren’t as cool as they once were.

They’re the man-buns

of the NBA.

But since this is the first time since 1991 that the Warriors and Lakers have played, this series carries some serious weight in those barstool and barber shop “conversations.”

Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley. Innovation vs. tradition. Purple vs. blue (and black?) That’s classic rivalry stuff, and it’s (mostly) all in good fun.

Then there’s the side action: It’s Curry vs. LeBron – perhaps for the last time.

That stopped being good fun a long time ago.

The players might

outs of the fifth but was pulled in favor of lefthander Hoby Milner after giving up an infield single to Estrada and a line single to Mitch Haniger. Peder son, left in the game for a left-on-left matchup to face Milner, struck out on a check swing to end the inning. Milner was the first of four relievers – Joel Payamps, Strzeleski and Devin Williams being the others – who held the Giants the rest of the way. Payamps (1-0) was credited with the win.

Vida Blue, former ace of the A’s and Giants in the ‘70s, dies at 73

M att K awahara THE MERCURY NEWS

Vida Blue, the dynamic left-handed pitcher who starred for both the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants in a prolific and tumultuous career, has died, his family and the A’s announced in a statement Sunday. He was 73.

Blue won 209 games and made six AllStar teams in 17 MLB seasons. He won the American League MVP and Cy Young awards in 1971 and won three World Series championships with the A’s from 1972 to ‘74.

Blue had been battling unspecified health issues. In April, he attended the A’s reunion of their 1973 World Series championship team at the Coliseum, where he declined to discuss his health but was in good spirits recalling his playing days on both sides of the Bay.

“I say there are A’s fans, Giants fans and Vida Blue fans,” Blue said that day.

“So I don’t know, I got

lucky, I guess.”

In a statement, the A’s said: “There are few players with a more decorated career than Vida Blue. ... Vida will always be a franchise legend and a friend.”

With a high leg kick and powerful fastball, Blue was a key member of the “Swingin’ A’s” dynasty, posting three 20-win seasons during Oakland’s run of five consecutive AL West titles from 1971 to ‘75.

Blue later pitched for the Giants and Royals and retired with a 209-161 record and 3.27 ERA. He started All-Star Games in both leagues – the first pitcher to do so – even amid off-the-field issues that impacted his career and later, he believed, his chances at the Hall of Fame.

“Vida Blue has been a Bay Area baseball icon for over 50 years,” Giants president and CEO Larry Baer said in a statement. “His impact on the Bay Area transcends his 17 years on the diamond

Kings offseason preview: Sabonis, Barnes, Vezenkov, draft, trades, free agency

Jason a nderson

THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Kings general manager Monte McNair and his staff know they have important work to do this summer to build on the impressive turnaround they orchestrated this season in Sacramento.

McNair was named NBA Basketball Executive of the Year and Mike Brown became the first unanimous selection as Coach of the Year after leading the Kings to their first playoff appearance since 2006. Sacramento won 48 games to secure the No. 3 seed in the Western Conference and pushed the defending champion Golden State Warriors to seven games in a first-round series for the ages, but now there are

other matters to address.

“We’ve talked since I came here about a shortterm goal of making the playoffs,” McNair said. “I’m happy to finally have that box checked, but it also means now on to the next goal of building this thing into a long-term playoff team, win some rounds in the playoffs and ultimately contend for a title, so the job is never done.”

The Kings want to improve their roster for a deeper playoff run next season. Doing so will require some combination of moves through the NBA draft, trades and free agency while navigating salary cap constraints and complexities of the collective bargaining agreement.

The draft is less than seven weeks away with free agency set to

begin July 1. The Kings have three picks in this year’s draft and key personnel decisions to make, most notably whether to re-sign unrestricted

free agent forward Harrison Barnes and/or sign Olympiacos star Sasha Vezenkov.

Change is inevitable, but the Kings have more

organizational stability than they’ve had in years. Brown and McNair are aligned with three years remaining on their respective deals. Most of the team’s top rotation players are under contract next season, including starters De’Aaron Fox, Kevin Huerter, Keegan Murray and Domantas Sabonis and top reserves Malik Monk and Davion Mitchell.

Still, there will be roster changes. The Kings are currently projected to have about $23 million in practical salary cap space, but they could create additional space if they are able to trade Richaun Holmes, who has two years and $24.9 million remaining on his contract.

Here’s a look at some of the key dates and details

for the Kings as they enter another big offseason.

Extending Sabonis

Sabonis is eligible to renegotiate and extend his contract, but that’s probably not likely this summer. New parameters in the collective bargaining agreement would allow the Kings to offer a four-year extension worth nearly $122 million. However, that would eliminate any salary cap flexibility the Kings can create this summer, hindering their ability to build the roster.

Besides, Sabonis can earn far more if he waits to become an unrestricted free agent next summer. At that point, the Kings will be able to give him

Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times file Lakers’ Dennis Schroder drives to the basket against the Warriors in the Western Conference semifinal, Saturday.

Jason O. Watson/Getty Images/TNS file Former pitcher Vida Blue of the Oakland Athletics speaks as he is inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame before the game against the Texas Rangers at the RingCentral Coliseum on Sept. 21, 2019, in Oakland.

Xavier Mascareñas/Tribune Content Agency

Sacramento Kings guard De’Aaron Fox (5) and center Domantas Sabonis (10), right, are presented with an All-Star ball by team owner Vivek Ranadivé and general manager Monte McNair, left, at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, Saturday, Feb. 11.

Shae Hammond/Bay Area News Group San Francisco Giants starting pitcher Ross Stripling (48) pitches against the Milwaukee Brewers at Oracle Park in San Francisco, Sunday.

Cheesy broccoli strudel a taste of the Moosewood cookbook’s magic

G. Daniela Galarza

THE WASHINGTON POST

Iwas intimidated the first time I sat down to eat at Moosewood. The restaurant, founded in 1973 in Ithaca, N.Y., by a collective of likeminded friends, was one of the country’s first to champion vegetarian and pescatarian dining. I was dabbling in vegetarianism at the time, in 2001, and saw Moosewood as a sort of temple to crunchy granola, with longtime practitioners who knew so much more about food than I did.

Back then I was in college, trying to pick a major and living, with around 18 others, at Triphammer Cooperative, a house on Cornell’s campus. I was in charge of meal planning for the residents, and that job taught me a lot. It was a crash course in vegetarian and vegan nutritional guidelines – the house was strictly vegetarian and included several vegans –but I also learned how to cost individual meals, the variability in people’s cooking styles and the importance of efficiency in the kitchen.

Here’s how it worked: As a condition of living at Triphammer, you had to sign up to cook and clean. Cooking was a group activity – three or four of us tackled each meal, and then another small crew cleaned up afterward. I was responsible for choosing recipes, scaling them up to feed 20 and working with another resident to order the food in bulk from wholesale purveyors.

Fortunately, the kitchen was fairly large, with a commercialsize, two-door fridge, separate freezer, six-burner stove, double sink and industrial dishwasher.

My favorite spot in that space was the cookbook cupboard, which was packed with books like “Diet for a Small Planet” by Frances Moore Lappé, “The Vegetarian Epicure” by Anna Thomas, “Vegetariana: A Rich Harvest of Wit, Lore, & Recipes” by Nava Atlas and “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” by Deborah Madison. Most of the books were falling apart at the binding, but the most-loved cookbook, the one where the cover had fallen entirely off and the pages were full of cook’s notes and food stains? That would be the original 1977 edition of “Moosewood Cookbook” by Mollie Katzen.

Everyone in the house loved cooking from that book. Katzen, a former art student, wrote the whole thing out by hand, including little drawings, calligrams and instructive illustrations that offered step-by-step guidance for more complicated dishes, such as egg rolls, shish-kebabs and savory broccoli-and-cheese strudel. That hand-drawn touch gave the book charm and approachability. There are no full-bleed photographs of carefully styled dishes. Rather than push aspirational perfectionism, the book promoted a fun DIY attitude that, in my experience, encouraged even the most skittish cooks to dive in and get their hands dirty. (Katzen would write a few more Moosewood books before the Moosewood Collective took over and published over a dozen of their own. The original remains one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time.) We cooked every single recipe from that book. There was vegetable chowder and split pea soup in the winter and chilled cucumber yogurt soup

and gazpacho in the spring. Turkish-style stuffed zucchini, cauliflower-cheese pie, lentilwalnut burgers and mushroom moussaka – one of the dishes Moosewood Restaurant made on its opening night – graced Triphammer’s long dining table more than once.

I taught many people how to handle phyllo dough when we got to the section on savory strudels. My favorite was the one filled with broccoli and sharp cheddar cheese. The filling gets bulked up with breadcrumbs, and seasoned with lemon juice and black pepper, before it’s stuffed into buttered phyllo and rolled up like a big burrito. Baked until crisp, sliced and served with a side salad, it makes a meal that reminds me of the magic of Moosewood.

BROCCOLI CHEESE STRUDEL

Active time: 30 minutes

Total time: 1 hour

4 servings

A simple, cheesy broccoli mixture fills this crisp strudel. The recipe, adapted

from “The Moosewood Cookbook” by Mollie Katzen makes a fine appetizer. To serve it as a main course, pair it with a side salad. Feel free to make additions to the filling, such as garlic, chile flakes or chopped herbs.

Storage: Refrigerate for up to

4 days, or freeze for 1 month.

2 tablespoons olive oil

½ small yellow onion (3 ounces), diced

2 cups (6 ounces) broccoli, chopped

1 8 teaspoon fine salt, plus more to taste

¾ cup (3 ounces) plain breadcrumbs

1 cup (5 ounces) grated cheddar cheese, preferably extra-sharp

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (from 1 large lemon)

Freshly cracked black pepper

8 ounces (13-by-18-inch) sheets phyllo dough, defrosted

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and divided

Step 1: Position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 375 degrees. Line a large, rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper.

Step 2: In a large saute pan over

medium-high heat, heat the olive oil until it shimmers. Add the onion and saute until translucent, about 4 minutes. Add the broccoli and salt and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until tender but still bright green, about 8 minutes. Remove from the heat.

Step 3: Stir in the breadcrumbs, cheese and lemon juice. Taste, and season with pepper and additional salt, if desired. Let cool while you prepare the phyllo.

Step 4: On a large, clean surface unroll the phyllo and cover it with a damp kitchen towel so it doesn’t dry out. Working quickly, pull two sheets off the stack, lay them so the wider side is facing you, and gently brush them with melted butter.

Step 5: Lay another two sheets on top, and brush them with melted butter. Repeat with the remaining 4 sheets.

Step 6: Using a large spoon, scoop the broccoli mixture into a line lengthwise near the edge of the phyllo closest to you, leaving an approximately 1-inch border on each end. Fold the short sides of the phyllo in and over the filling, and then roll the filling up in the phyllo, forming a 3-by-12-inch log.

Step 7: Place the log, seam side down, on the prepared baking sheet. Brush the top and sides of the strudel with more melted butter and, using a sharp knife, cut four diagonal slits into the top of the strudel to allow steam to escape. Bake for 30 minutes, or until deep golden brown and crisp. Cool for 5 minutes on the baking sheet before slicing and serving.

Nutritional facts per serving (one 4-inch slice) | Calories: 501, Carbohydrates: 52 g, Cholesterol: 45 mg, Fat: 26 g, Fiber: 4 g, Protein: 17 g, Saturated Fat: 11 g, Sodium: 689 mg, Sugar: 3 g.

This analysis is an estimate based on available ingredients and this preparation. It should not substitute for a dietitian’s or nutritionist’s advice.

How to macerate fruit so it goes from drab to delightful

The WashinGTon PosT

A perfectly ripe peach or strawberry is a culinary marvel. But with fruit not at its peak, such as stone fruit in the spring or strawberries in the winter, there’s much to be desired. In times like those, maceration can give a much-needed flavor boost and texture shift to transform sad fruit from drab to delightful.

Though typically associated with berries, any type of fruit, fresh or dried, can be macerated. The technique of macerating fruit is similar to marinating in that you simply let

it soak in liquid to absorb flavor, as well as soften (or plump in the case of dried fruit). The key ingredient is sugar of some sort, such as granulated or brown, or honey. Sometimes that’s all it takes to draw moisture from fresh fruit. If adding a liquid, common choices include alcohol, vinegar and fruit juice. Herbs and/ or spices, such as cinnamon sticks or sprigs of rosemary, can be included for even more flavor.

When you sprinkle sugar over a bowl of fresh, sliced berries, you’ll see a syrup form almost immediately, but the best results can take as little as 20 minutes and

up to overnight, depending on the fruit (with a stir every now and then). “The time depends on the thickness of the fruit skin, the texture of the flesh, and the desired outcome,” Kansas State University extension

specialist Karen Blakeslee wrote. “If mixing a variety of fruit, start with the firmer or thick-skinned fruit, then add the softer fruit later.” Once mixed, macerated fresh fruit can last up to three or four days

covered in the fridge, and dried fruit should last at least a couple weeks.

For the pie bakers among us, maceration is a nifty way to control the juiciness of pie filling to prevent a soggy crust. To do so, if making a standard 9-inch pie, combine the recipe’s fruit and sugar in a large bowl, let it macerate for 30 minutes or so, strain the juices and reduce them on the stovetop until 1⁄3 to 1⁄4 cup remains, and then combine with the fruit and thickener (most often cornstarch) to form the filling. Once the pie is properly baked, you should be able to cut nice, neat slices

instead of ending up with a soupy mess.

Aside from pie, the most common uses of the technique include amping up the flavor of fruit salad, spooning atop cheesecake, sandwiching inside shortcakes with whipped cream, and serving with cakes of all types. (Macerated fruit is a great way to zhuzh up store-bought pound cake.) Some other ideas to enjoy it include swirling macerated fruit into a bowl of yogurt and granola, serving alongside grilled or roasted meats, layering in an ice cream sundae or mixing into drinks. Sangria, anyone?

Fold the short sides of the phyllo in and over the filling, and then roll the filling up in the phyllo, forming a 3-by-12-inch log.

Rey Lopez/The Washington Post photos

Serve cheesy broccoli strudel with a side salad to make a meal.

Rey Lopez/The Washington Post Mixed berries before they have been macerated.

Zombie cars are all around us

AND MORE ARE ON THE WAY

Hummer OGs.

Tribune ConTenT AgenCy

Jamie Feldmar, a Los Angeles food writer, spends an inordinate amount of time with an old Armenian man named Raffi.

Raffi is not a fun hang, but he is a talented mechanic. Specifically, he’s a savant of Saabs, the long-dead maker of the 1993 convertible that Feldmar bought six months ago. “I basically had a crush on this car,” she says. “I would see one on the street and I’d lose my mind.”

Keeping the car alive, however, has been a slog, requiring a parade of tow trucks, hours of eBay hunting and many Armenian pastries for Raffi. “The first couple of weeks were amazing,” Feldmar says, but now she’s afraid to drive long distances. “I’m not going to say I regret my decision, but I understand why people who do this generally have a second car.”

Feldmar may not have known exactly what she was getting into, but she did know that she was effectively buying a 3,000pound zombie. Other car owners find themselves in a similar spot when the company that builds their vehicle of choice discontinues the model, or happens to go under itself. The arc of automotive history is long and littered with the corpses of auto corporations.

As the transition to electric vehicles brings an entirely new cohort of car companies into existence – many of them still struggling to manufacture at scale – more drivers than ever are facing the zombie threat.

Lucid Group Inc., for example, could be the next Ford Motor Co., or it could be another Saab story. The same goes for Rivian Automotive Inc., Lordstown Motors Corp. and a crowd of other freshman carmakers. Some EV buyers are clamoring to snap up these vehicles while few of them exist in the wild, but others worry about an exciting novelty turning into an ownership nightmare.

A car is born

Since Henry Ford and his rivals started fiddling around with “horseless carriages” in 1903, there have been roughly 2,500 car companies in the U.S. alone; today, there are about 50. For every Cadillac, there’s a crowd of Pontiacs and for every Hummer EV, there are dozens of

Plenty of these discontinued models still have sizable followings: Nearly one in five enthusiast vehicles (either older or very scarce automobiles) is made by a company that has since ceased to exist, according to Hagerty Inc., which insures collectibles.

JessieLeigh Freeman, a

Plenty of these discontinued models still have sizable followings: Nearly one in five enthusiast vehicles (either older or very scarce automobiles) is made by a company that has since ceased to exist.

mechanic in New Jersey, was barely in high school when General Motors shuttered its Saturn imprint. Despite knowing nothing about the brand, seven years later she bought one. Now Freeman owns 19 Saturns and is bent on “saving” as many of them as she can.

“They are very unloved,” Freeman says. “But they look good, they’re easy to work on, they’re underappreciated and they’re very good cars.”

It helps that Freeman is essentially her own Raffi. But she also devotes significant time to keeping her fleet alive. Because they tend to rust, functioning Saturns are getting harder to find – though ironically, the rust makes it easier for Freeman to source parts. Any decent-sized junkyard tends to house a snoozing Saturn or two with rotted body panels and relatively sound organs.

A century from now, the zombie ranks are sure to include cars that just made their debut, or are about to. The sweep of auto electrification has led to a boom in car startups, and the industry’s 14 or so conglomerates now find themselves pitted against a crowd of newbies like Lucid, Rivian, Lordstown, Faraday Future Intelligent Electric Inc. and Workhorse Group Inc. In addition to managing sticker shock, alleviating range anxiety and – crucially – churning out the actual cars, these scrappy auto entrepreneurs must also convince customers that they’re here for the long haul.

That may not be easy. While the newest EV-makers have had little trouble raising capital, cash is also disappearing quickly as they hustle to spin up factories, supply chains and sales channels. For every vehicle Lucid delivered last year, it logged $139,000 in revenue and $376,000 in costs, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Rivian, meanwhile, spent $235,000 more than it collected on each of its trucks in 2022. Even Tesla is offering steep discounts to stay competitive against incumbent automakers catching up to electrification.

Several EV upstarts are already staring down acute financial threats. Rivian’s market capitalization is down to $12 billion from its $150 billion debut in late 2021. Although growth projections and production pledges remain lofty, the company’s value is now almost exactly in line with the pile of cash it has on hand. Elsewhere in the EV ecosystem, Lordstown Motors said this week that if a fraught funding deal with Foxconn doesn’t go through, it may have to file for bankruptcy.

For a struggling car company, an existential crisis can become a selffulfilling prophecy. Enough bad quarters, recalls and investor side-eye, and would-be buyers start looking elsewhere. Prospective car owners might be put off by Altman Z-Scores, for example, which use financial information to estimate how likely it is for a company to go bankrupt. At least six of the bright young EV-makers have a Z-score under 0, a level considered on the brink of solvency.

There is already some evidence of this calculus weighing on purchasing decisions. Six out of 10 car buyers now say they are at least somewhat likely to buy electric, according to JD Power. But the youngest car companies – including Lucid, Fisker, Rivian and Polestar – rank at the bottom of the list of brands they’re considering.

Name recognition and high price points may be part of the problem, concedes Elizabeth Krear, vice president of JD Power’s EV practice. However, “the risk is higher now that well-known, established brands continue rolling out compel-

ling models.”

Polestar, for what it’s worth, says it has seen no sign of skittish customers, in part because it’s a “pure EV” brand with the backing of an auto titan in Volvo, the company’s largest shareholder. “Polestar offers customers the best of both worlds,” says Michael Whittington, head of global sales. How to care for your zombie

When a car company does fold, its progeny are left listless: Car owners must move on to a new whip, or coordinate maintenance and repairs within a shrinking network.

“My takeaway for a prospective buyer is be very skeptical,” says Brian Moody, executive editor for Autotrader.com (who also has an inconvenient Saab habit). “At some point, some of these cars are best used as a garden decoration.”

To start, warranties may or may not be covered by some kind of zombie financial instrument. (Saabs, for example, were still being serviced under warranty years after the company’s 2011 funeral.) Then there’s the

istry. “Either a cottage industry will develop or the enthusiasts will have to help each other out to keep these cars on the road.”

Keeping an old Corvette running, for example, is easy –largely because General Motors has made almost 2 million of them over a 70-year period. By contrast and with the exception of Tesla, the new crop of electric vehicles is still trickling out of factories. In 2022, Lucid, Rivian and Polestar collectively made about 130,000 cars and trucks. Volkswagen Group churns out that many in a slow week.

“A manufacturer wants to keep making parts as long as it’s profitable,” Moody says. “And (new EV-makers are) just not at the scale the way a Honda, Toyota, Ford or Chevy is.”

Maxon says upkeep of newer orphan cars can be particularly finicky. They’re full of plastic pieces, which both break more easily and are trickier to make than metal. (Feldmar’s Saab, for example, gushed a tank of gas onto the streets of LA after a plastic fastener snapped off the fuel tank.) EV-makers’ techinspired product plan – ship, then iterate – also means that when a company runs out of road, so do its software updates.

— Brian Moody, executive editor for Autotrader.com

declining number of mechanics knowledgeable enough to tune a cast-off car and source the pieces needed to keep it running.

The availability of both of these things is a numbers game. In some cases, the supply chain is literally the email of the guy still making the one-off wheels or tuning the tricky carburetors. But if the market is big enough, third-party companies will fill the void.

“The passion for the cars kind of dictates what the ownership will be like when the owner no longer supports the car,” says Casey Maxon, senior manager of heritage at the Hagerty Drivers Foundation, a nonprofit that, among other things, is building a National Historic Vehicle Reg-

Of course, car choices are a convenient statement of identity, and piloting a zombie is a strong statement of originality. Once orphaned, a unique vehicle is only guaranteed to get more rare, with comparably appreciating Instagram cred. Just ask the 100 or so people who bought one of the first EVs, the Coda in, 2012; or the couple thousand optimists piloting a Fisker Karma, an early and very brief Tesla rival.

To that end, the same mysterious gravity Saturn has over Freeman can be found between many recent car buyers and their Lucid or Polestar – namely the desire to have something less than ubiquitous.

That was the calculus for Ryan Dossey, a Florida-based real estate investor who recently ditched a Tesla Model X for a Lucid Air. “I ride motorcycles; I paraglide; I enjoy doing things other people don’t,” he says. “This kind of felt in that vein.”

Dossey considered the longevity of Lucid and the risk therein, but he has a plan if his car becomes a zombie: “I’ll just get rid of it.”

Darren Walker/Dreamstime/TNS

A Saab 99 EMS is seen in a junkyard in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

‘A manufacturer wants to keep making parts as long as it’s profitable. And (new EV-makers are) just not at the scale the way a Honda, Toyota, Ford or Chevy is.’

Quest to save the raccoon becomes the most empty, brutal MCU movie yet

Michael PhilliPs CHICAGO TRIBUNE

‘Everyone deserves a second chance,” says one forgiving character about another’s transgressions (attempted murder, in this case) in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” The line written by screenwriter James Gunn refers obliquely, or at least coincidentally, to his own firing off the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise after Disney took a look at his Twitter feed’s jokes about rape and pedophilia and the like. Then they gave him a second chance. And here we are.

It’s the usual pale male instance of who gets the doovers in Hollywood and who doesn’t. If you stretch for a more charitable reading, it’s an indication of some theoretically reassuring but, in this case, fruitless creative latitude afforded a highly skilled, highly uneven wiseacre.

To wit, or in this case, witless: The MCU’s gunkiest, most grotesque and most aggravating product to date comes from the same writerdirector who delivered a zippy first “Guardians” entry, followed by wobbly but fairly diverting yo-yo of a middle installment. Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” so named because volumes are so much more impressive than “parts” or plain numbers, already has its ardent fans who (based on the one-word quotes in the TV ads) respond, on some cellular level, to the wanton brutality mixed with notably callous zingers, plus a heavy load of “Endgame”-style pathos. Life and movies and fandom: They’re all funny that way.

I’m in full agreement with my 13-year-old MCU devotee stepson who, on the long ride home after the “Guardians 3″ screening, called the movie “a lot of animal abuse, plus killing, and four hours of angry people yelling at each other.”

The movie’s 150 minutes feel like 240, and Gunn spends

Daily Cryptoquotes

Here’s how to work it:

MOVIE Review

‘Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 3’

Rated PG-13 150 minutes

H (OUT OF FOUR)

many of those minutes dealing with flashbacks and present-day scenes of Dr. Moreau “Island of Lost Souls” crossspecies experimentation in what feels like a particularly vicious animal shelter. If a superhero movie’s quality could be quantified by closeups of bleeding, shivering, terrified digital-but-real-looking creatures, some of whom are shot point-blank for maximum traumatization of the audience, “Guardians 3″ would sail straight past the Oscars to the Pulitzer committee.

The movie’s a blur of detours. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt, whose eyes get wider as his material gets dumber) and the rest of the Guardians must rescue Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) from the Dr. Moreau rip-off, “The High Evolutionary” (Chukwudi Iwuji). The antagonist schemes to perfect the utopian nightmare he has begun constructing on Counter-Earth, which is “Don’t Worry Darling” suburbia populated by genetic mutants in slacks and frocks.

There’s more, notably a wary reunion of Quill and the memory-wiped reborn version of Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and a trip to the Orgosphere, which is pink, skeezy-looking joint. There, and on an already broken-down Counter-Earth, Gunn favors little touches of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and, more innocently, the 1966 “Fantastic Voyage,” if “Fantastic Voyage” set course for a pus-flecked version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

These details aside: I’ve enjoyed much of Gunn’s work,

especially the first “Guardians” and the recent box-office flop “The Suicide Squad.” At his most intuitive, he cracks the elusive code of violence mixed with macabre humor. Here it’s just sourness and chaos the whole way, with every thundering golden-oldies hit setting the tone of things, mostly ironically, always, always obviously. The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter. Is there really much of a difference between Gunn’s notion of fantasy brutality and suffering and “realistic” bloodletting?

As designed and executed here, with the usual digital viscera flying around just quickly enough to ensure the (frankly idiotic) PG-13 rating, I don’t think so. The tonal clashes don’t stimulate; they flatten the collective response. I saw “Guardians 3″ with a full crowd ready to whoop, and the whooping ended with the opening credits. The snark tastes like ashes in your mouth: If it’s not a casual beatdown of a mugging scored, jauntily, to “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” it’s a fuzzball of a mutated pet peeing itself for a laugh while fireballs and mayhem consume the frame, expensively.

What’s enticing to Disney and Marvel Studios doesn’t necessarily have to feel like punishment. But it does, sometimes, and maybe more often lately. The third and desultory “Ant-Man” movie, “Quantumania,” laid there like a green-screen lox. “Guardians 3″ is considerately worse; it trashes the camaraderie of its core ensemble (Dave Bautista’s Drax remains the deadpan standout) in favor of one deafening, vicious flourish after another.

Worst MCU ever? I know a 13-year-old target audience member who thinks so.

Word Sleuth

Bridge by Phillip Alder

West and South hands. In the auction South has shown a balanced 13-15 points and 4-4 in the majors. Against four spades, your partner leads the club two, fourth-highest in principle. After winning with the jack, how would you continue?

DO YOU HAVE THE PROPER INSIGHT?

Will a computer ever match a human at bridge? Never! Although a computer counts reliably and remembers all of the cards, in particular the hidden-card and psychological elements make it impossible for a computer to play at an expert level. Take today’s deal as an example. If you wish to test yourself, cover the

Sudoku

Bridge

5/9/23

DO YOU HAVE THE PROPER INSIGHT?

Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 grid contains the digits 1 through 9, with no repeats. That means that no number is repeated in any row, column or box. Solution, tips and computer program at www.sudoku.com

Will a computer ever match a human at bridge? Never! Although a computer counts reliably and remembers all of the cards, in particular the hidden-card and psychological elements make it impossible for a

True, it looks as though you stand no chance. Declarer seems to have 4-4-3-2 distribution with the spade ace-jack, the heart king-queen and the diamond ace. Even if you switch to a deceptive diamond nine, declarer will rise with the ace, draw trumps and cash four heart tricks, discarding dummy’s diamond queen. Sitting East was the Brazilian superstar Gabriel Chagas. He realized that the only chance was to find partner with the heart queen and declarer with three clubs. At trick two, Chagas cashed the club ace. Then he switched to the diamond nine. Now look at it from South’s perspective. He thought that if he finessed in diamonds, West would win with the king and give East a club ruff. So South went up with the diamond ace, drew trumps and played a club to dummy’s 10.

Imagine his shock when Chagas produced the queen and cashed the diamond king for down one. A computer will never be able to find a deceptive play like that.

COPYRIGHT: 2023, UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE

by Wayne Gould

Dist. by creators.com

Difficulty level: SILVER

Yesterday’s solution:

Marvel Studios/TNS

Chris Pratt stars in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.”

Heroes search for lost relatives in theaters this week

SuSan Hiland SHILAND@DAILYREPUBLIC.NET

FAIRFIELD —

Coming to local theaters is a sequel to “Book Club,” which takes the four friends to Italy for a fun vacation that turns into a moving adventure across the country.

Also in local theaters is a film about a detective searching for his missing daughter and finds himself investigating some of the strangest crimes he has ever seen.

Finally, a fan favorite anime series brings to life Saint Seiya for a live action film about a young man searching for his sister.

Opening nationwide are:

“Book Club: The Next Chapter,” a highly anticipated sequel that follows four best friends as they take their book club to Italy for the fun girls trip they never had. When things go off the rails and secrets are revealed, their relaxing vacation turns into a once-in-a-lifetime cross-country adventure. The film is rated PG-13.

“Hypnotic,” in which a detective becomes entangled in a mystery involving his missing daughter and a secret government program while investigating a string of reality-bending crimes.

The film is rated R. “Knights of the Zodiac,” in which the international anime Saint Seiya saga comes to the big screen in live-action for the first time. Seiya a headstrong street teen, spends his time fighting for cash while he searches for his abducted sister. When one of his fights unwittingly taps into mystical powers he never knew he had, Seiya finds himself thrust into a world of warring saints, ancient magical training and a reincarnated goddess who needs his protection. If he’s to survive, he will need to embrace his destiny and sacrifice everything to take his rightful place among the Knights of the Zodiac. The film is rated PG-13.

Opening in limited release are:

“BlackBerry,” in which two mismatched entrepreneurs – Mike Lazaridis and cut-throat businessman Jim Balsil-

lie – joined forces in an endeavor that changed the world with the BlackBerry phone. The device that one invented and the other sold was an addictive mobile phone that changed the way the world worked, played and communicated. But just as BlackBerry was rising to new peaks, it also started losing its way through the fog of smartphone wars, management indecision and outside distractions, eventually leading to the breakdown of one of the most successful ventures in the history of the tech and business worlds. The film is rated R. “Fool’s Paradise,” in which a down-on-his-luck publicist (Ken Jeong) gets his lucky break when he discovers a man recently released from a mental health facility (Charlie Day) looks just like a method actor who refuses to leave his trailer. With the help of a powerful producer (the late Ray Liotta), the publicist helps the man become a huge star, even marrying his beautiful leading lady (Kate Beckinsale). Fame and fortune are not all they are cracked up to be, and the two men must fight their way back to the things that matter the most. The film is rated R. “L’immensità,” in which Clara (Penélope Cruz) and her emotionally distant husband Felice (Vincenzo Amato) relocate to Rome to raise a family. Even though the paint is fresh, and the appliances are new, the crushing expectations around marriage, desire and gender in the early 1970s remain as traditional as ever. This film is not rated.

For information on Edwards Cinemas in Fairfield, visit www. regmovies.com/ theatres/regal-edwardsfairfield-imax. For Vacaville showtimes, visit www. brendentheatres.com. For Vallejo showtimes, check www.cinemark. com/theatres/ca-vallejo. More

Pickles Brian Crane

Zits Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman

Pearls Before Swine Stephan Pastis

Candorville Darrin Bell

Baby Blues Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott

Baldo Hector Cantú and Carlos Castellanos

Turkey elections: Are voters ready to move on from Erdogan?

The WashingTon PosT

ISTANBUL — For Kemal Sen, a locksmith, the two issues that mattered most to him as he prepared to cast his vote in a critical Turkish election were “stability and the economy,” though he seemed most concerned with his wallet.

“Our buying power is less, as it is in most of the world, but I think it’s hurt Turkey more,” he said.

In interviews across Istanbul, many voters expressed similar anxiety about the state of their finances ahead of pivotal presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14 that have caught an uneasy country at a moment of colliding calamities – including stubborn economic hardship and the aftermath of deadly earthquakes that killed more than 50,000 people and left large parts of the its south in ruins.

In an election being closely watched around the world - one that could have consequences for Turkey’s ties with Europe, the Middle East and the United States, as well as for conflicts from Syria to Ukraine – many voters are preoccupied with bread-and-butter issues. Their concerns have left Turkey’s longtime leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 69, facing an unusually unified band of opposition parties and more vulnerable to a challenge than at any time during his two decades in power.

Erdogan had to be defeated, some voters said, citing concerns such as a deficit of freedom and democracy, the influx of refugees or rising violence against women. Even some supporters said he deserved censure, though they were not sure he should be replaced. They were united in their concerns about the economy, marked over the past few years by soaring inflation and the collapse of Turkey’s currency.

Last year, “if you were able to buy 10 kilos of meat, now you can only afford eight kilos,” said Sen, who is 39 and married with four daughters. Goods that were imported at his store had become more expensive because of the exchange rate. Though he criti-

cized Erdogan for the state of the economy, he was “hopeful” that the worst of the crisis had passed.

“I would like for Erdogan to win one more time, even if it is the last time, at least for the country to get back to stability,” he said – a term that for him included Erdogan’s focus on making Turkey a military power that produced its own defense hardware.

Erdogan “does have his issues, but I don’t find his opponent to be a real opponent,” he said, referring to Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a 74-year old, soft-spoken former civil servant who is the chosen candidate of the six opposition parties.

“All they do is criticize what Erdogan does and they don’t say anything productive,” he said.

Duygu Celik, 44, was a homemaker until eight months ago, when high inflation forced her to find work as a cleaner in a stationery shop to provide her family with extra income.

She blamed the faltering economy on “Syrians and other foreigners” who had settled in Turkey. “This is not an issue of racism for me,” she said. “I know that they’ve had a war in their country. But I don’t find it right

that they’re here. For example, I can’t pay 14,000 lira in rent,” she said, or about $720 per month. “I earn minimum wage, which is 8,500 lira [per month]. And my husband also works. We have a student in university. We barely make ends meet.” Her son, in university, was eligible to travel abroad for an exchange program, “but we can’t afford that,” she said. She was more anguished that her son wanted to leave Turkey for good.

“I want him to live here, and add things to our country here.” The reason her son wanted to emigrate, she said, was “Erdogan.”

She had voted for Erdogan in the past but had become dismayed by allegations of government corruption – over the possibility that some were “perhaps putting stuff in their pockets.”

“It’s hard for me to say this as someone who has previously voted for them,” she said. “I am not going to be voting for them again.” Her preferred candidate was Muharrem Ince, a former high school physics teacher who previously ran and lost against Erdogan. His candidacy has caused consternation among other opposition groups,

who fear he could split the antiErdogan vote.

Celik said she most regretted voting in Erdogan’s favor during a 2017 referendum that granted him broad powers and changed Turkey’s system of government from a parliamentary to a presidential system. “One person should not be running the entire country,” she said.

Hatice Ozaydin, 68, bought a stationery shop in Istanbul’s Sirinevler neighborhood with her son three years ago, as the economy started tumbling. She doubts they would have been able to afford it today. “Everything is so expensive – vegetables, restaurants,” she said.

She didn’t know the reasons for the economic downturn and rising inflation, she said, but “it’s never happened like this before. It was never like it is now.”

As she spoke, the roar of fighter jets could be heard overheard, one of several demonstrations of military strength that Erdogan has used to appeal to voters.

She had no sympathy for Turkey’s political opposition, claiming they were affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK – an apparent ref-

erence to support Kilicdaroglu has received from a major proKurdish opposition party. In recent weeks, Erdogan and his allies have relentlessly tried to tar the opposition, accusing them of links to terrorism and sympathy with LGBTQ people.

As for her vote, Ozaydin said, “I am going to give it to Erdogan again, even if the economy is bad.”

In a square in Sirinevler, near the metro-bus station that commuters use to travel to central Istanbul, Nuri Bora Demir, 28, said the election made him think about “the difference, in just a few years, in my living standard.” Demir, who works at a customs company, is married with an infant son.

Turks like him used to plan vacations, he said. “Now I can’t afford to buy anything.”

In Turkey’s current environment, he said, there was a lack of opportunity for people his age. College graduates could only look forward to state jobs, as police officers, or “cashiers at Burger King,” he said. “It all goes back to the economy,” he said. But the election would not necessarily solve anything. “When I look at my age group, I don’t see a candidate for us.”

“If you look at the candidates,” he said, “they are all pretty old.”

The main issue in the election “is actually freedom, for me,” said Yunus Emre Hasbek, 24, as he sat with friends outside Bahcesehir University in the city’s Besiktas neighborhood.

“Press independence,” added his friend Said, 22, who declined to give his last name.

“The economy,” said Ilayda Erdem, 21. “There are issues with nepotism,” she added, saying Turkey was no longer a “meritocracy.”

They had lived all their lives under one leader, and for the sake of their freedom, wanted a change. “You can’t say anything about Erdogan,” Said said. “Less government control” was Hasbek’s main hope. “Almost no control,” he added.

Nicole Tung/The Washington Post file

Volunteers at a campaign stand for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Istanbul, April 26.

NoticeofSelfStorageSale

PleasetakenoticeCentralSelfStorage-EastTravis837ETravisBlvdFairfieldCA 94533intendstoholdanauctionofthegoodsstoredinaself-servicestorageunitbythe followingpersons.Thesalewilloccurasanonlineauctionviawww.storagetreasures.com on5/17/2023at12:00PM.Unlessstatedotherwisethedescriptionofthecontentsare householdgoodsandfurnishings:

IsaacOscilia

KennethOneal

VanessaSaragosa MayraHernandezBravo

KathyFloyd JamieHudgins Allpropertyisbeingstoredattheaboveself-storagefacility.Thissalemaybewithdrawn atanytimewithoutnotice.Certaintermsandconditionsapply.Seemanagerfordetails.

5/1,5/8/23

CNS-3692384#

THEDAILYREPUBLIC

DR#00062751

Published:May1,8,2023

APN:0034-232-140TSNo:CA08001175-22-1TONo:220523109-CA-VOINOTICEOF TRUSTEE'SSALE(TheabovestatementismadepursuanttoCACivilCodeSection 2923.3(d)(1).TheSummarywillbeprovidedtoTrustor(s)and/orvestedowner(s)only pursuanttoCACivilCodeSection2923.3(d)(2).)YOUAREINDEFAULTUNDERA DEEDOFTRUSTDATEDSeptember1,2006.UNLESSYOUTAKEACTIONTOPROTECTYOURPROPERTY,ITMAYBESOLDATAPUBLICSALE.IFYOUNEEDAN EXPLANATIONOFTHENATUREOFTHEPROCEEDINGSAGAINSTYOU,YOU SHOULDCONTACTALAWYER.OnJune12,2023at09:30AM,atSantaClaraStreet entrancetotheCityHall,555SantaClaraStreet,Vallejo,CA94590,MTCFinancialInc dbaTrusteeCorps,asthedulyAppointedTrustee,underandpursuanttothepowerof salecontainedinthatcertainDeedofTrustrecordedonSeptember11,2006asInstrumentNo.200600114676,andthatsaidDeedofTrustwasmodifiedbyModification AgreementandrecordedMay16,2013asInstrumentNumber201300049704,andthat saidDeedofTrustwasmodifiedbyModificationAgreementandrecordedJuly25,2016 asInstrumentNumber201600062797,andthatsaidDeedofTrus twasmodifiedbyModificationAgreementandrecordedOctober3,2016asInstrumentNumber201600084919 ofofficialrecordsintheOfficeoftheRecorderofSolanoCounty,California,executedby WILLIAMH.CLARK,ANUNMARRIEDMANANDRAYA.DUNHAMSANDSTEPHANIE PERCY-DUNHAMS,HUSBANDANDWIFE,ALLASJOINTTENANTS,asTrustor(s),in favorofMORTGAGEELECTRONICREGISTRATIONSYSTEMS,INC.,asBeneficiary asnomineeforSCMEMORTGAGEBANKERS,INC.,ACALIFORNIACORPORATION asBeneficiary,WILLSELLATPUBLICAUCTIONTOTHEHIGHESTBIDDER,inlawful moneyoftheUnitedStates,allpayableatthetimeofsale,thatcertainpropertysituated insaidCounty,Californiadescribingthelandthereinas:ASMOREFULLYDESCRIBED INSAIDDEEDOFTRUSTThepropertyheretoforedescribedisbeingsold"asis".The streetaddressandothercommondesignation,ifany,oftherealpropertyd escribed aboveispurportedtobe:2312SANTACLARASTREET,FAIRFIELD,CA94533TheundersignedTrusteedisclaimsanyliabilityforanyincorrectnessofthestreetaddressand othercommondesignation,ifany,shownherein.Saidsalewillbemadewithoutcovenantorwarranty,expressorimplied,regardingtitle,possession,orencumbrances,topay theremainingprincipalsumoftheNote(s)securedbysaidDeedofTrust,withinterest thereon,asprovidedinsaidNote(s),advancesifany,underthetermsoftheDeedof Trust,estimatedfees,chargesandexpensesoftheTrusteeandofthetrustscreatedby saidDeedofTrust.Thetotalamountoftheunpaidbalanceoftheobligationssecuredby thepropertytobesoldandreasonableestimatedcosts,expensesandadvancesatthe timeoftheinitialpublicationofthisNoticeofTrustee’sSaleisestimatedtobe $470,194.08(Estimated).However,prepaymentpremiums,accruedinterestandadvanceswillincreasethisfigurepriortosale.Beneficiary’sbidatsaidsalemayincludeall orpartofsaidamount.Inadditiontocash,theTrusteewillacceptacashier’scheck drawnonastateornationalbank,acheckdrawnbyastateorfederalcreditunionora checkdrawnbyastateorfederalsavingsandloanassociation,savingsassociationor savingsbankspecifiedinSection5102oftheCaliforniaFinancialCodeandauthorizedto dobusinessinCalifornia,orothersu chfundsasmaybeacceptabletotheTrustee.Inthe eventtenderotherthancashisaccepted,theTrusteemaywithholdtheissuanceofthe Trustee’sDeedUponSaleuntilfundsbecomeavailabletothepayeeorendorseeasa matterofright.Thepropertyofferedforsaleexcludesallfundsheldonaccountbythe propertyreceiver,ifapplicable.IftheTrusteeisunabletoconveytitleforanyreason,the successfulbidder’ssoleandexclusiveremedyshallbethereturnofmoniespaidtothe Trusteeandthesuccessfulbiddershallhavenofurtherrecourse.NoticetoPotentialBiddersIfyouareconsideringbiddingonthispropertylien,youshouldunderstandthatthere arerisksinvolvedinbiddingataTrusteeauction.Youwillbebiddingonalien,notonthe propertyitself.PlacingthehighestbidataTrusteeauctiondoesnotautomaticallyentitle youtofreeandclearownershipoftheproperty.Youshouldalsobeawarethatthelien beingauctionedoffmaybeajuniorlien.Ifyouarethehighestbidderattheauction,you areormayberesponsibleforpayingoffallliensseniortothelienbeingauctionedoff,beforeyoucanreceivecleartitletotheproperty.Youareencouragedtoinvestigatetheexistence,priority,andsizeofoutstandingliensthatmayexistonthispropertybycontactingthecountyrecorder'sofficeoratitleinsurancecompany,eitherofwhichmaycharge youafeeforthisinformation.Ifyouconsulteitheroftheseresources,youshouldbe awarethatthesameLendermayholdmorethanonemortgageorDeedofTrustonthe property.NoticetoPropertyOwnerThesaledateshownonthisNoticeofSalemaybe postponedoneormoretimesbytheMortgagee,Beneficiary,Trustee,oracourt,pursuanttoSection2924goftheCaliforniaCivilCode.Thelawrequiresthatinformationabout TrusteeSalepostponementsbemadeavailabletoyouandtothepublic,asacourtesyto those notpresentatthesale.Ifyouwishtolearnwhetheryoursaledatehasbeenpostponed,and,ifapplicable,therescheduledtimeanddateforthesaleofthisproperty,you maycallInSourceLogicat702-659-7766forinformationregardingtheTrustee'sSaleor visittheInternetWebsiteaddresslistedbelowforinformationregardingthesaleofthis property,usingthefilenumberassignedtothiscase,CA08001175-22-1.Information aboutpostponementsthatareveryshortindurationorthatoccurcloseintimetothe scheduledsalemaynotimmediatelybereflectedinthetelephoneinformationoronthe InternetWebsite.Thebestwaytoverifypostponementinformationistoattendthescheduledsale.NoticetoTenantNOTICETOTENANTFORFORECLOSURESAFTERJANUARY1,2021YoumayhavearighttopurchasethispropertyafterthetrusteeauctionpursuanttoSection2924moftheCaliforniaCivilCode.Ifyouarean“eligibletenantbuyer,” youcanpurchasethepropertyifyoumatchthelastandhighestbidplacedatthetrustee auction.Ifyouarean“eligiblebidder,”youmaybeabletopurchasethepropertyifyou exceedthelastandhighestbidplacedatthetrusteeauction.Therearethreestepstoexercisingthisrightofpurchase.First,48hoursafterthedateofthetrusteesale,youcan call702-659-7766,orvisitthisinternetwebsitewww.insourcelogic.com,usingthefile numberassignedtothiscaseCA0 8001175-22-1tofindthedateonwhichthetrustee’s salewasheld,theamountofthelastandhighestbid,andtheaddressofthetrustee Second,youmustsendawrittennoticeofintenttoplaceabidsothatthetrusteereceivesitnomorethan15daysafterthetrustee’ssale.Third,youmustsubmitabidso thatthetrusteereceivesitnomorethan45daysafterthetrustee’ssale.Ifyouthinkyou mayqualifyasan“eligibletenantbuyer”or“eligiblebidder,”youshouldconsidercontactinganattorneyorappropriaterealestateprofessionalimmediatelyforadviceregarding thispotentialrighttopurchase.Date:May2,2023MTCFinancialInc.dbaTrusteeCorps TSNo.CA08001175-22-117100GilletteAveIrvine,CA92614Phone:949-252-8300 TDD:711949.252.8300By:BernardoSotelo,AuthorizedSignatorySALEINFORMATIONCANBEOBTAINEDONLINEATwww.insourcelogic.comFORAUTOMATED SALESINFORMATIONPLEASECALL:InSourceLogicAT702-659-7766OrderNumber91483,PubDates:5/8/2023,5/15/2023,5/22/2023,DAILYREPUBLIC

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Disclaimer: F Fair Housing is the Law! The mission of the Department of Fair Employment and Housing is to protect the people of California from unlawful discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations. The Daily Republic will not knowingly accept any ad which is in violation of the Federal Fair Housing Act and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act which ban discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, r eligion, sexual orientation, age, disability, familial status, and marital status. Describe the Property Not the Tenant

Toallheirs,beneficiaries,creditors,contingentcreditors,andpersonswhomay otherwisebeinterestedinthewillorestate,orboth,of: Melbourne Kimsey APetitionforProbatehasbeenfiledby: Ramona Hackbart intheSuperiorCourtofCalifornia,County of:Solano ThePetitionforProbaterequeststhat: Melbourne Kimsey, II, and Brian L. Kimsey beappo intedaspersonalrepresentative toadministertheestateofthedecedent. Thepetitionrequeststhedecedent'swill andcodicils,ifany,beadmittedtoprobate.Thewillandanycodicilsareavailableforexaminationinthefilekeptbythe court. ThepetitionrequestsauthoritytoadministertheestateundertheIndependentAdministrationofEstatesAct.(Thisauthority willallowthepersonalrepresentativeto takemanyactionswithoutobtainingcourt approv al.Beforetakingcertainveryimportantactions,however,thepersonal representativewillberequiredtogivenoticetointerestedpersonsunlessthey havewaivednoticeorconsentedtothe proposedaction.)Theindependentadministrationauthoritywillbegrantedunless aninterestedpersonfilesanobjectionto thepetitionandshowsgoodcausewhy thecourtshouldnotgranttheauthority.

A hearing on the petition will be held in this court as follows: DATE: June 7, 2023; TIME: 9:00 a.m.; DEPT. 22 SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, County of Solano Old Solano Courthouse 580 Texas St. Fairfield, CA 94533

If you object tothegrantingofthepetition,youshouldappearatthehearingand stateyourobjectionsorfilewrittenobjectionswiththecourtbeforethehearing. Yourappearancemaybeinpersonorby yourattorney. If you are a creditor or a contingent creditor of the decedent, youmustfileyourclaimwiththecourtand mailacopytothepersonalrepresentative appointedbythecourtwithinthe later of either(1)four months fromthedateof firstissuanceofletterstoageneralpersonalrepresentative,asdefinedinsection58(b)oftheCaliforniaProbateCode, or(2) 60 days fromthedateofmailingor personaldeliverytoyouofanoticeunder section9052oftheCaliforniaProbate Code. Other California statutes and legal authority may affect your rights as a creditor. You may wantto consult with an attorney knowledgeable in California law. You may examine the file kept by the court.Ifyouareapersoninterestedinthe estate,youmayfilewiththecourtaRequestforSpecialNotice(formDE-154)of thefilingofaninventoryandappraisalof estateassetsorofanypetitionoraccount asprovidedinProbateCodesection 1250.ARequestforSpecialNoticeformis availablefromthecourtclerk. AttorneyforPetitioner:CarlenaL.Tapella WeintraubTobin, 400CapitolMall,11thFloor,

Toallheirs,beneficiaries,creditors,contingentcreditors,andpersonswhomay otherwisebeinterestedinthewillorestate,orboth,of: Ruth Mitchell Laughlin, aka Ruth M. Laughlin, aka Ruth Laughlin APetitionforProbatehasbeenfiledby: James William Laughlin intheSuperiorCourtofCalifornia,County of:Solano ThePetitionforProbaterequeststhat: James William Laughlin beappointedaspersonalrepresentative toadministertheestateofthedecedent. ThepetitionrequestsauthoritytoadministertheestateundertheIndependentAdministrationofEstatesAct.(Thisauthority willallowthepersonalrepresentativeto takemanyactionswithoutobtainingcourt approval.Beforetakingcertainveryimportantactions,however,thepersonal representativewillberequiredtogivenoticetointerestedpersonsunlessthey havewaivednoticeorconsentedtothe proposedaction.)Theindependentadministrationauthoritywillbegrantedunless aninterestedpersonfilesanobjectionto thepetitionandshowsgoodcausewhy thecourtshouldnotgranttheauthority.

A hearing on the petition will be held in this court as follows:

DATE: May 31, 2023; TIME: 9:00 am;

DEPT. 22

SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, County of Solano Old Solano Courthouse 580 Texas Street Fairfield, CA 94533

If you object tothegrantingofthepetition,youshouldappearatthehearingand stateyourobjectionsorfilewrittenobjectionswiththecourtbeforethehearing. Yourappearancemaybeinpersonorby yourattorney. If you are a creditor or a contingent creditor of the decedent, youmustfileyourclaimwiththecourtand mailacopytothepersonalrepresentative appointedbythecourtwithinthe later of either(1)four months fromthedateof firstissuanceofletterstoageneralpersonalrepresentative,asdefinedinsection58(b)oftheCaliforniaProbateCode, or(2) 60 days fromthedateofmailingor personaldeliverytoyouofanoticeunder section9052oftheCaliforniaProbate Code. Other California statutes and legal authority may affect your rights as a creditor. You may wantto consult with an attorney knowledgeable in California law. You may examine the file kept by the court.Ifyouareapersoninterestedinthe estate,youmayfilewiththecourtaRequestforSpecialNotice(formDE-154)of thefilingofaninventoryandappraisalof estateassetsorofanypetitionoraccount asprovidedinProbateCodesection 1250.ARequestforSpecialNoticeformis availablefromthecourtclerk.

Petitioner:JamesWilliamLaughlin 507TopekaLn., Vacaville,CA95687 707-685-0561 DR#00063079 Published:May5,8,12,2023

Toallheirs,beneficiaries,creditors,contingentcreditors,andpersonswhomay otherwisebeinterestedinthewillorestate,orboth,of: Jestener Hart; Jestener Haynie Hart; Jestener Haynie APetitionforProbatehasbeenfiledby: Steve Hart intheSuperiorCourtofCalifornia,County of:Solano ThePetitionforProbaterequeststhat: Steve Hart beappointedaspe rsonalrepresentative toadministertheestateofthedecedent. ThepetitionrequestsauthoritytoadministertheestateundertheIndependentAdministrationofEstatesAct.(Thisauthority willallowthepersonalrepresentativeto takemanyactionswithoutobtainingcourt approval.Beforetakingcertainveryimportantactions,however,thepersonal representativewillberequiredtogivenoticetointerestedpersonsunlessthey havewaivednoticeorconse ntedtothe proposedaction.)Theindependentadministrationauthoritywillbegrantedunless aninterestedpersonfilesanobjectionto thepetitionandshowsgoodcausewhy thecourtshouldnotgranttheauthority.

A hearing on the petition will be held in this court as follows:

DATE: June 14, 2023; TIME: 9:00 am; DEPT. 22;; RM. 3

SUPERIOR COURT OF CALIFORNIA, County of Solano 600 Union Avenue PO CALLER 5000 Fairfield, 94533 Hall of Justice

If you object tothegrantingofthepetition,youshouldappearatthehearingand stateyourobjectionsorfilewrittenobjectionswiththecourtbeforethehearing. Yourappearancemaybeinpersonorby yourattorney. If you are a creditor or a contingent creditor of the decedent, youmustfileyourclaimwiththecourtand mailacopytothepersonalrepresentative appointedbythecourtwithinthe later of either(1)four months fromthedateof firstissuanceofletterstoageneralpersonalrepresentative,asdefinedinsection58(b)oftheCaliforniaProbateCode, or(2) 60 days fromthedateofmailingor personaldeliverytoyouofanoticeunder section9052oftheCaliforniaProbate Code. Other California statutes and legal authority may affect your rights as a creditor. You may wantto consult with an attorney knowledgeable in California law. You may examine the file kept by the court.Ifyouareapersoninterestedinthe estate,youmayfilewiththecourtaRequestforSpecialNotice(formDE-154)of thefilingofaninventoryandappraisalof estateassetsorofanypetitionoraccount asprovidedinProbateCodesection 1250.ARequestforSpecialNoticeformis availablefromthecourtclerk.

Petitioner:YvonneF.Thrasher,Esq. 78CernonStreet,SuiteA Vacaville,CA95688-2808 (707)447-1200 DR#00063073 Published:May5,8,12,2023

CALENDAR

Monday’s TV sports

be genial with each other, and Lakers fans – annoying as they might be – can be civil, but the same cannot be said of the nomadic tribe that has pledged their fealty and curiously excessive free time to LeBron.

These are, after all, the folks who thought the new Space Jam was a good move. How can you take anyone like that seriously?

These same folks made G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) part of the lexicon. That’s an unforgivable transgression.

These folks go on social media and unwatchable talking-head television shows and declare that we should forget this weekend’s coronation in England. No, the one true king is James.

LeBron fans are as shameless as they are relentless. They won’t shut up about the Warriors blowing a 3-1 lead in the 2016 NBA Finals, even

From Page B1

with the influence he’s had on our community.”

Just 19 when he debuted in 1969, Blue made a splash when the A’s called him up again in late 1970. He threw a one-hit shutout against the Royals in his second outing that season. Ten days later, Blue fired a no-hitter against the Twins, the seventh in A’s franchise history.

In 1971, Blue authored one of major-league pitching’s all-time great seasons. He went 24-8 with a 1.82 ERA, eight shutouts and 24 complete games in 39 starts. He totaled 301 strikeouts in 312 innings and became the youngest player named AL MVP in the 20th century.

“That was probably one of the better years I’ve ever seen a pitcher have,” former A’s and Hall of Fame reliever Rollie Fingers said by phone Sunday. “He blew everybody away.

“There were times I’d go down to the bullpen when he was warming up and I’d just get up and walk back to the dugout and say, ‘Game’s over, boys. No one’s going to hit this guy today.’”

That season made Blue a national sensation. He appeared on the covers of Time and Sports Illustrated magazines and was a top box office draw around the league. But it also set the stage for a contentious contract dispute with thenA’s owner Charlie Finley that spilled over into the following season.

Blue made a salary of about $14,500 in 1971 – thenPresident Richard Nixon said he “must be the most underpaid player in the game” – and held out in spring 1972 when the stingy Finley would not meet his request for a raise.

Blue settled with the A’s in May for a reported

though that happened during the Obama administration, and Curry and the Warriors have won three more titles since.

And while it’s hard to blame James for all of this, you are the product of the company you keep. Maybe these LeBron fans are why

$63,000 but said at the time that Finley had “soured my stomach for baseball. ... I’ll never forget that he treated me like a damn colored boy.”

“It changed my attitude about the game,” Blue, who briefly said he’d leave baseball during his holdout, told The Chronicle in 2019. “I never recovered totally, mentally, what the game meant to me.”

Blue went 6-10 in 1972 and pitched mainly in relief in the playoffs as the A’s won the first of their three straight championships. But he helped anchor Oakland’s pitching staffs in ensuing seasons, going 91-67 with a 3.13 ERA and three top-six Cy Young finishes from 1973 to ‘77.

Dave Stewart, the A’s ace in the late ‘80s and ‘90s who grew up in Oakland, wrote on Twitter on Sunday: “I remember watching a 19 year old phenom dominate baseball, and at the same time alter my life. There are no words for what you have meant to me and so many others.”

Though Blue could still dial up a fastball, he never again matched the gaudy strikeout totals of his MVP year. His record was mixed in the postseason; he compiled a 1-5 record and 4.31 ERA across 17 outings for the A’s, but those included a two-hit shutout of the Orioles in Game 3 of the 1974 ALCS and saves in the decisive Game 5 of the 1972 ALCS (four scoreless innings) in Detroit and Game 1 of the World Series that year.

“Umpires enjoyed umpiring him behind home plate because they’d put the glove up and he would more or less hit the glove,” Fingers said. “He had great control. And then he had a nasty, nasty curveball. His arm speed was just about the same as his fastball arm speed. So it was tough to tell when he was going to throw it.”

Blue went 22-11 in 1975 and was part

James keeps changing teams – he’s trying to run away from them.

Yes, The Warriors might be down 2-1, but they are a Game 4 win away from establishing the upper hand in the series, as it would regain home-court advantage for Golden State.

The Warriors have a

of another no-hitter in the final game of that season, combining with three other A’s pitchers – Glenn Abbott, Paul Lindblad and Fingers – to blank the Angels. Blue pitched the first five innings of what was at the time just the third combined no-hitter in MLB history. In 1976, Finley tried to sell Blue to the Yankees and Fingers and Joe Rudi to the Red Sox, but thenMLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn negated the deals. Finley, who had once tried to pay Blue to change his first name to “True,” then tried to send Blue to the Reds for $1.75 million in another move that was nixed.

Blue was traded in early 1978 across the Bay to the Giants – for seven players and $300,000 – ahead of his last great season. Still just 28, Blue went 18-10 and started the 1978 All-Star Game for the NL. He spent three more seasons on the Giants, making two more All-Star teams, before a trade to the Royals.

A’s assistant general manager Billy Owens, who grew up in San Jose, recalled attending a game at Candlestick Park at age 6 and receiving two baseballs from Blue in the bleachers. Owens said it was “truly an honor to meet and thank him decades later.”

“Vida Blue was a kind man,” Owens said. “Truly one of the first great superstars of Oakland Athletics baseball. His name personified star power and electricity. ... Besides his accomplishments he was a humble, gracious man.”

In Kansas City, Blue and several teammates were caught in a federal cocaine investigation. Blue served 81 days in prison and was banned from baseball for the 1984 season.

“It was a dark time in my life,” Blue said in 2019. “You use bad judgment. You make bad choices. You learn from them. Sometimes we can overcome them and share them

brilliant opportunity to muzzle those unendurable LeBron fans in this series.

And they can silence Lakers fans, too.

Taking out two loud, annoying birds with one stone?

That’s the futuristic utopia we were promised. I can’t wait to live in it.

to help others.” Blue returned to pitch two more seasons with the Giants in 1985 and ‘86. He later worked in the team’s community relations department. His struggles with substance abuse continued with three incidents of DUI from 1999-2005. But he later served as a TV analyst for Giants’ broadcasts and is a member of both the A’s team Hall of Fame and the Giants’ Wall of Fame.

Blue retired with 143 complete games and 37 shutouts over 502 MLB outings. He ranks 101st in career wins, 67th in strikeouts (2,175) and 90th in innings (3,343 1/3 ). He appeared on Hall of Fame ballots for the first time in 1992 but fell off after four years, never receiving more than 8.7% of the vote.

“I had some issues in my life that might have had a tendency to sway voting,” Blue told The Chronicle in 2021. “There are some guys in the Hall of Fame who don’t have halos. But I played on some great teams, and I accomplished a few things I never thought I’d accomplish.”

Vida Rochelle Blue Jr. was born in Mansfield, La., on July 28, 1949. He played baseball and football as a youth and was recruited to play the latter by major college programs including Houston, which wanted him as a quarterback.

After Blue’s father died during his senior year of high school, Blue, one of six siblings, opted to sign a contract with the A’s, who took him in the second round of the 1967 draft from De Soto High School. Later, at times, Blue wore his distinctive first name on the back of both his A’s and Giants jerseys.

“All I know, man, is it’s a great way to make a living,” Blue said last month in Oakland. “A guy from Mansfield, La., who came out here to California to seek his fortune. I got to see the world.”

L.A. Lakers vs. Golden State, TNT, 7 p.m.

Hockey

NHL Playoffs

• Vegas vs. Edmonton, ESPN, 5:30 p.m.

Soccer ECL

• Millwall vs. Blackburn, ESPN2, 7 a.m.

EPL

• Fulham vs. Leicester, USA, 7 a.m.

• Brighton & Hove Albion vs. Everton, USA, 9:30 a.m.

• Nottingham vs. Southampton, USA, Noon.

Tuesday’s TV sports

Baseball College

• Vanderbilt vs. Louisville, ESPN2, 3 p.m.

MLB

• Oakland vs. N.Y. Yankees, NBCSCA, 4:05 p.m.

• Boston vs. Atlanta, TBS, 4:20 p.m.

• Washington vs. San Francisco, NBCSBA, 6:45 p.m.

Basketball NBA Playoffs

• Philadelphia vs. Denver, TNT, TBD.

• Phoenix vs. Denver, TNT, TBD.

Golf College

• PGA WORKS Collegiate Championship, GOLF, 1:30 p.m.

Hockey

NHL Playoffs

• Carolina vs. New Jersey, ESPN, 4 p.m.

• Dallasvs. Seattle, ESPN, 6:30 p.m.

Soccer Champions League

• Real Madrid vs. Manchester City, 5, 13, Noon.

Kings

From Page B1

a five-year max con tract that could be worth somew here around $245 million. Either way, McNair has signaled his intention to sign Sabonis to a long-term deal.

“Domas is obviously an All-Star this year,” McNair said. “I think he should be All-NBA along with De’Aaron, so we’ll find that out soon, buy, yeah, Domas is a huge part of what we do and we’re going to do all we can to keep him here and build around him.”

What about Barnes?

McNair was not as direct in response to a question about Barnes, who is headed into unrestricted free agency after concluding the final year of a four-year, $85 million contract. Brown has called Barnes “irreplaceable” and Barnes has expressed a desire to stay, telling The Sacramento Bee he has “sweat equity” in Sacramento’s turnaround, but his position is one of the few spots the Kings can target in an effort to improve their size, length, athleticism, defense and rebounding.

“We’re going to sit down and have all those conversations,” McNair said when asked about Barnes. “Obviously, Harrison has been a fantastic part of our team, a vet leader, and one of two guys with championship experience for us, which was a big part of getting our young guys ready to go, so we’ll have all those conversations in the coming weeks.”

NBA draft

The NBA draft will be held June 22 in Brooklyn, New York. The Kings will have picks No. 24, 38 and 54. McNair and his staff, which includes vice president of player personnel Phil Jabour, have drafted well. They selected Tyrese Hailburton at No.

12 in 2020, Mitchell at No. 9 in 2021 and Murray at No. 4 in 2022.

The Kings have held lottery picks in 15 of the last 16 drafts. They are moving back 20 spots this year following their remarkable run to the playoffs, but they will be looking for value and trade possibilities with their first- and secondround picks.

Clutch Points currently projects the Kings will select Jaime Jaquez Jr., a 6-foot7, 225-pound guard/ forward from UCLA, at No. 24. Tankathon has them taking Xavier guard Colby Jones. NBA Draft Room is projecting Michigan guard Kobe Bufkin.

Free agency

The Kings must decide which of their own free agents they want to retain before they hit the open market. Barnes, Trey Lyles, Terence Davis and Alex Len are all unrestricted free agents. Lyles, who established a role for himself as a stretch four and small-ball five, will likely return on a value contract. The others could be moving on.

The Kings are expected to renew discussions with Vezenkov, a 27-year-old forward whose draft rights were acquired last summer in a trade with the Cleveland Cavaliers. Vezenkov is the reigning Greek League MVP and a leading candidate for Euroleague MVP this season.

Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group

Golden State Warriors fan Deepika Birdal, left, and her husband Chirag Patel, a Los Angeles Lakers fan, of Walnut Creek, stand during the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals at Chase Center in San Francisco, May 2, 2023.

Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee file (2022) Sacramento Kings forward Domantas Sabonis (10) reacts after forward Harrison Barnes (40) hits a three, Dec. 21, 2022.