Israel targets a West Bank militant stronghold with drones and troops, killing 8 Palestinians

• July 3, 2023

By NASSER NASSER and JOSEF FEDERMAN

JENIN, West Bank — Israel struck targets in a militant stronghold in the occupied West Bank with drones early Monday and deployed hundreds of troops in the area, in an incursion that resembled the wide-scale military operations carried out during the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago. Palestinian health officials said at least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded.

Troops remained inside the Jenin refugee camp at midday Monday, pushing ahead with the largest operation in the area during more than a year of fighting. It came at a time of growing domestic pressure for a tough response to a series of attacks on Israeli settlers, including a shooting attack last month that killed four Israelis.

Black smoke rose from the crowded streets of the camp, exchanges of fire rang out and the buzzing of drones could be heard overhead as the military pressed on. Residents said electricity was cut off in some parts and military bulldozers plowed through narrow streets, damaging buildings as they cleared the way for Israeli forces. The Palestinians and neighboring Jordan and Egypt and the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned the violence.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the operation was “proceeding as planned,” but gave no indication when the incursion would end. Fighting was continuing at midafternoon, some 14 hours after Israel entered the camp.

Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an army spokesman, said a brigade-size force — roughly 2,000 soldiers — was taking part in the operation, and that military drones had carried out a series of strikes to clear the way for the ground forces.

Although Israel has carried out isolated airstrikes in the West Bank in recent weeks, Hecht said Monday’s series of strikes was an escalation unseen since 2006 — the end of the Palestinian uprising.

Smoke billowed from within the crowded camp, with mosque minarets in the backdrop. Ambulances raced toward a hospital where the wounded were brought in on stretchers.

Lynn Hastings, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian areas, said on Twitter that she was “alarmed by scale of Israeli forces operation,” noting the airstrikes in a densely populated refugee camp. She said the U.N. was mobilizing humanitarian aid.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the military blocked roads within the camp, took over houses and buildings and set up snipers on rooftops. The tactics signaled the operation could drag on for some time.

“There are bulldozers destroying the streets, snipers are inside and on roofs of houses, drones are hitting houses and Palestinians are killed in the streets,” said Jamal Huweil, a political activist in the camp, predicting the operation would fail.

“They can destroy the refugee camp but will fail again because the only solution is the political solution in which a Palestinian state is established and the occupation ends,” he said.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said at least eight Palestinians were killed and 50 people were wounded — 10 critically.

In a separate incident, a 21-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the ministry said.

“Our Palestinian people will not kneel, will not surrender, will not raise the white flag, and will remain steadfast on their land in the face of this brutal aggression,” said Palestinian presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh.

The Jenin camp and an adjacent town of the same name have been a flashpoint as Israeli-Palestinian violence escalated since spring 2022.

Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, accused archenemy Iran of being behind the violence by funding Palestinian militant groups.

“Due to the funds they receive from Iran, the Jenin camp has become a center for terrorist activity,” he told foreign journalists, adding that the operation would be conducted in a “targeted manner” to avoid civilian casualties.

Palestinians reject such claims, saying the violence is a natural response to 56 years of occupation since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war.

Jenin has long been a bastion for armed struggle against Israel and was a major friction point in the last Palestinian uprising.

In 2002, days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a large Passover gathering killed 30 people, Israeli troops launched a massive operation in the Jenin camp. For eight days and nights they fought militants street by street, using armored bulldozers to destroy rows of homes, many of which had been booby-trapped.

Monday’s raid came two weeks after another violent confrontation in Jenin and after the military said a pair of rockets were fired from the area last week. The rockets exploded shortly after launch, causing no damage in Israel, but marked an escalation that has raised concerns in Israel.

But there also may have been political considerations at play. Leading members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which is dominated by West Bank settlers and their supporters, have been calling for a broader military response to the ongoing violence in the area.

“Proud of our heroes on all fronts and this morning especially of our soldiers operating in Jenin,” tweeted National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist who recently called for Israel to kill “thousands” of militants if necessary. “Praying for their success.”

Israeli military experts said they expected the operation to wrap up quickly — within hours or a day or two. Prolonged violence and heavy casualties would risk attracting increased international criticism and drawing militants from the Gaza Strip or even Lebanon into the fighting.

“From the Israeli point of view, the intent and interest are to end this very limited operation ASAP and to make sure it does not become a regional event,” said Giora Eiland, a retired Israeli general and former national security adviser.

Islamic Jihad, a militant group with a large presence in Jenin, threatened to launch attacks from its Gaza Strip stronghold if the fighting dragged on.

“If the Israeli aggression against Jenin does not stop, the Palestinian resistance will do what it has to do in a short time,” said Dawood Shehab, a spokesman for the group.

More than 130 Palestinians have been killed this year in the West Bank, part of more than a yearlong spike in violence that has seen some of the worst bloodshed in the area in nearly two decades.

The outburst of violence escalated last year after a spate of Palestinian attacks prompted Israel to step up its raids in the West Bank.

Israel says the raids are meant to beat back militants. The Palestinians say such violence is inevitable in the absence of any political process with Israel and increased West Bank settlement construction and violence by extremist settlers.

Israel says most of those killed have been militants, but stone-throwing youths protesting the incursions and people uninvolved in confrontations have also been killed.

Palestinian attacks against Israelis since the start of this year have killed 24 people.

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek those territories for their hoped-for independent state.

Federman reported from Jerusalem. AP writer Julia Frankel in Jerusalem and Omar Akour in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

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​ Orange County Register 

Passport backup is snarling summer travel plans

• July 3, 2023

By LAURIE KELLMAN, REBECCA SANTANA and DAVID KOENIG | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Seeking a valid U.S. passport for that 2023 trip? Buckle up, wishful traveler, for a very different journey before you step anywhere near an airport.

A much-feared backup of U.S passport applications has smashed into a wall of government bureaucracy as worldwide travel rebounds toward record pre-pandemic levels — with too few humans to handle the load. The result, say aspiring travelers in the U.S. and around the world, is a maddening pre-travel purgatory defined, at best, by costly uncertainty.

With family dreams and big money on the line, passport seekers describe a slow-motion agony of waiting, worrying, holding the line, refreshing the screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees and following incorrect directions. Some applicants are buying additional plane tickets to snag in-process passports in other cities so they can make the flights they booked in the first place.

So grim is the outlook that U.S. officials aren’t even denying the problem or predicting when it will ease. They’re blaming the epic wait times on lingering pandemic -related staffing shortages and a pause of online processing this year. That’s left the passport agency flooded with a record-busting 500,000 applications a week. The deluge is on-track to top last year’s 22 million passports issued, the State Department says.

Stories from applicants and interviews by The Associated Press depict a system of crisis management, in which the agencies are prioritizing urgent cases such as applicants traveling for reasons of “life or death” and those whose travel is only a few days off. For everyone else, the options are few and expensive.

So, 2023 traveler, if you still need a valid U.S. passport, prepare for an unplanned excursion into the nightmare zone.

‘PLENTY OF TIME’ TO ‘WE’LL STILL BE OK’ TO BIG PROBLEMS

It was early March when Dallas-area florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports ahead of a family vacation at the end of June. The clerk, she said, estimated wait times at eight to 11 weeks. They’d have their passports a month before they needed them. “Plenty of time,” Collier recalled thinking.

Then the State Department upped the wait time for a regular passport to as much as 13 weeks. “We’ll still be okay,” she thought.

At T-minus two weeks to travel, this was her assessment: “I can’t sleep.” This after months of calling, holding, pressing refresh on a website, trying her member of Congress — and stressing as the departure date loomed. Failure to obtain the family’s passports would mean losing $4,000, she said, as well as the chance to meet one of her sons in Italy after a study-abroad semester.

“My nerves are shot, because I may not be able to get to him,” she said. She calls the toll-free number every day, holds for as much as 90 minutes to be told — at best — that she might be able to get a required appointment at passport offices in other states.

“I can’t afford four more plane tickets anywhere in the United States to get a passport when I applied in plenty of time,” she said. “How about they just process my passports?”

THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT HAS A CULPRIT: COVID

By March, concerned travelers began asking for answers and then demanding help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who widely reported at hearings this year that they were receiving more complaints from constituents on passport delays than any other issue.

The U.S. secretary of state had an answer, of a sort.

“With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out of the system,” Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee March 23. When demand for travel all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government let contractors go and reassigned staff that had been dedicated to handling passports.

Around the same time, the government also halted an online renewal system “to make sure that we can fine tune it and improve it,” Blinken said. He said the department is hiring agents as quickly as possible, opening more appointments and trying to address the crisis in other ways.

Passport applicants lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers and lawmakers’ phone lines with questions, appeals for advice and cries for help. Facebook and WhatsApp groups bristled with reports of bewilderment and fury. Reddit published eye-watering diaries, some more than 1,000 words long, of application dates, deposits submitted, contacts made, time on hold, money spent and appeals for advice.

It was 1952 when a law required, for the first time, passports for every U.S. traveler abroad, even in peacetime. Now, passports are processed at centers around the country and printed at secure facilities in Washington, D.C. and Mississippi, according to the Government Printing Office.

But the number of Americans holding valid U.S. passports has grown at roughly 10% faster than the population over the past three decades, according to Jay Zagorsky, an economist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

After passport delays derailed his own plans to travel to London earlier this year, Zagorsky found that the number of U.S. passports per American has soared from about three per 100 people in 1989 to nearly 46 per 100 people in 2022. Americans, it turns out, are on the move.

“As a society gets richer,” says Zagorsky, “the people in that society say, ‘I want to visit the rest of the world.’”

FOR AMERICANS AND OTHERS ABROAD, IT’S NO PICNIC EITHER

At U.S. consulates overseas, the quest for U.S. visas and passports isn’t much brighter.

On a day in June, people in New Delhi could expect to wait 451 days for a visa interview, according to the website. Those in Sao Paulo could plan on waiting more than 600 days. Aspiring travelers in Mexico City were waiting about 750 days; in Bogota, Colombia, it was 801 days.

In Israel, the need is especially acute. More than 200,000 people with citizenship in both countries live in Israel. It’s one appointment per person, even for newborns, who must have both parents involved in the process, before traveling to the United States.

Batsheva Gutterman started looking for three appointments immediately after she had a baby in December, with an eye toward attending a family celebration in July, in Raleigh, N.C.

Her quest for three passports stretched from January to June, days before travel. And it only resolved after Gutterman payed a small fee to join a WhatsApp group that alerted her to new appointments, which stay available for only a few seconds. She ultimately got three appointments on three consecutive days — bureaucracy embodied.

“We had to drive the entire family with three small children, an hour-and-a-half to Tel Aviv three days in a row, taking off work and school,” she said. “This makes me incredibly uneasy having a baby in Israel as an American citizen, knowing there is no way I can fly with that baby until we get lucky with an appointment.”

Recently, there appeared to be some progress. The wait for an appointment for a renewed U.S. passport stood at 360 days on June 8. On July 2, the wait was down to 90 days, according to the web site.

FRUSTRATING TALES EMERGE FROM THE TRENCHES

Back in the U.S., Marni Larsen of Holladay, Utah, stood in line in Los Angeles on June 14, in hopes of snagging her son’s passport. That way, she hoped, the pair could meet the rest of their family, who had already left as scheduled for Europe, for a long-planned vacation.

She’d applied for her son’s passport two months earlier and spent weeks checking for updates online or through a frustrating call system. As the mid-June vacation loomed, Larsen reached out to Sen. Mitt Romney ’s office, where one of four people he says is assigned full-time to passport issues were able to track down the document in New Orleans.

It was supposed to be shipped to Los Angeles, where she got an appointment to retrieve it. That meant Larsen had to buy new tickets for herself and her son to Los Angeles and reroute their trip from there to Rome. All on a bet that her son’s passport was indeed shipped as promised.

“We are just waiting in this massive line of tons of people,” Larsen said. “It’s just been a nightmare.”

They succeeded. But not everyone has been so lucky.

Miranda Richter applied in person to renew passports for herself and her husband on Feb. 9 for a trip with their neighbors to Croatia on June 6. She ended up canceling, losing more than $1,000.

Her timeline went like this: Passports for her husband and daughter arrived in 11 weeks, while Richter’s photo was rejected. On May 4, she sent in a new one via priority mail. Then she paid a rush fee of $79, which was never charged to her credit card. Between May 30 and June 2, four days before travel, Richter and her husband spent more than 12 hours on the national passport line while also calling their congressman, senators and third-party couriers.

Finally, she showed up in person at the federal building in downtown Houston, 30 minutes before the passport office opened. Richter said there were at least 100 people in line.

“The security guard asked when is my appointment, and I burst out in tears,” she recalls. She couldn’t get one. “It didn’t work.”

FINALLY: A HAPPY ENDING

“I just got my passports!” Ginger Collier texts.

She ended up showing up at the passport office in Dallas with her daughter-in-law at 6:30 a.m. and being sorted into groups and lined up against walls. Finally they were called to a window, where the agent was “super nice” and pulled all four of the family’s applications — paperwork that had been sitting in the office since March 17. More than seven hours later, the two left the office with directions to pick up their passports the next day.

They did — with four days to spare.

“What a ridiculous process,” Collier says. Nevertheless, the reunion with her son in Italy was sweet. She texted last week: “It was the best hug ever!”

___

Kellman reported from Tel Aviv, Israel, Santana reported from Washington, and Koenig reported from Dallas. Follow Kellman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/APLaurie Kellman, Santana at http://twitter.com/russkygal and Koenig at http://twitter.com/airlinewriter.

​ Orange County Register 

Man, 54, killed in 7-vehicle 605 Freeway crash in Lakewood

• July 3, 2023

LAKEWOOD — A 54-year-old man was killed Sunday in a seven-vehicle crash on the 605 Freeway in Lakewood.

The man was later identified as Kelly Drake, according to Medical Examiner’s office.

The crash was reported at 8:14 p.m. on the southbound San Gabriel River Freeway at Carson Street, California Highway Patrol Officer Stephen Brandt told City News Service.

A news videographer at the scene said the crash was triggered by an earlier two-vehicle crash at the Carson Street off-ramp after several vehicles were unable to stop to avoid the wreckage.

He said Drake was the passenger in one of the vehicles and another person was taken to a hospital with injuries.

All southbound lanes except the far right lane were shut down for the investigation and cleanup, Brandt said.

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​ Orange County Register 

How the ringing in John Cotter’s ear led to his ‘Losing Music’

• July 3, 2023

In 2008, writer John Cotter first started hearing a ringing in his ear. It’s the kind of annoyance that everyone experiences at some point — after a loud concert, say, or time spent near a construction site. Usually, it goes away.

But Cotter’s only got worse.

The ringing became a roar, “made of several tones, high and low together, like a lawnmower near your ear and a plane not far away. It announced itself with clicks and whistles, changing the pressure in my ears, a kind of buzzy gravity, a planet made of static.” He began to lose his hearing and started having frightening vertigo spells.

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After a long series of medical appointments, Cotter was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear disorder with no known cause and no known cure.

In his new memoir, “Losing Music,” the writer details his struggle with the illness, which threatened to take away one of the things he loved the most: “What I feared losing — the catastrophe that the roaring shadowed forth — wasn’t just a series of structured sounds, but the world those sounds created, a world you could live inside,” he writes.

Cotter discussed his book via telephone from New England, where he lives. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Q: You first became ill in 2008. What made you decide to write this book after dealing with hearing loss and vertigo for several years?

I thought that writing the story would be a way to understand it. This thing was happening to me. It was entirely outside of my control, but writing about it was inside of my control. Sometimes you don’t know how you’re feeling until you write about how you’re feeling. I also felt very isolated because I’d had to quit most of the things I do for work. I’d had to cancel a lot of social obligations. I couldn’t leave the house when I was really vertiginous. So it was a way of communicating. If you can’t call someone on the phone because you can’t hear voices, and you can’t get in the car and go teach your students, you can maybe, eventually, if you put enough work into it, hand someone a book.

Q: How did you manage your emotional health when you were writing about these extremely painful parts of your life?

I managed my mental health not at all when writing the book. [Laughs.] But the act of writing it was mentally helpful because you have a certain power over things once you can describe them and organize them on the page. You know, life doesn’t make any sense. It’s this useless mass of data. It’s this thing that happens to you, picks you up and shakes you; you don’t know what the thing was that picked you up and shook you. You can’t even make sense of the fingerprints that it left behind. But to make something constructed is to find a shape for it. It’s to organize a series of pictures. It’s to curate reality into a pattern. And this becomes something you can get your head around, get your hands around. It enables you to feel more in control, and more than that, to be able to feel as though you can interact with this thing that life is, and this thing that life is doing to you.

Q: The epigraph of your book is from the French journalist Xavier Aubryet: “Illness and Paris are mutually exclusive terms; Paris only likes healthy people, because it only likes success, and illness is as much a failure as poverty.” Have there been times during your illness where you felt that you had somehow failed?

We make plans for ourselves, and we don’t realize we’re doing it most of the time. We may think that our plan for our day is just whatever we scribble down on that blotter paper or whatever’s in our Google calendar. But we’re unconsciously planning the next day, the next week. There are two versions of our future. There’s the person we’re trying to catch up with, for whom everything has worked out, and their relationships are healthier, and they’re in better shape, and things are starting to click. Things are working out. Then there’s the version of ourselves who’s trying to catch us, who we’re running in flight from. That’s the version of us whose health is failing, whose relationships are falling apart, whose dreams have been disassembled. We’re caught between those two people. And when we fall behind, we feel as though we’re failing not only the expectations that other people have of us, but also ourselves. 

Q: This had to be a hard book to write. Was the feeling of having finished it, having it out in the world, worth what you went through while writing it?

It’s changed the terms of my life. That’s the dream, right? The dream is that you can shape your story and articulate your story, and then by doing so, you’re changing the terms of your own life. I feel like I’ve done that. But the process was taxing. I would say to myself, “Why have I been in a bad mood for three days?” And then I would think, “Oh, it’s because I’m rewriting the chapter of my book that was about the darkest moment in my life.” And when you keep returning to that moment, it’s like Nietzsche’s eternal return. It’s like “Groundhog Day.” You keep finding yourself in that same worst moment in your life. But it gave me a purpose in my life. It gave me a ladder to climb back to life.

Q: What’s your relationship to music like now?

It’s kind of like some old tomcat that you’ve been feeding on the back porch, and sometimes he won’t show up for weeks, and you’ll worry he’s gone for good. You’ll worry about what happened to him, and then one day he’s there again. There are many days when it would be pretty useless for me to try to listen to music, and sometimes I try anyway. I’ve just decided to accept that I don’t hear it the way I used to hear it, that it can’t be perfect for me any longer. And that’s OK. It can still purr and scratch at the door.

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​ Orange County Register 

Southern California’s boring car colors resell poorly

• July 3, 2023

Buy yellow, sell black.

That’s the suggestion of a study looking at used-car prices based on a vehicle’s color by iSeeCars. The used-car tracker compared this year’s pricing on 2020 vehicles vs. the original manufacturer’s suggested retail price to determine a depreciation rate.

Personally, it irks me to see Southern California streets and parking lots filled with vehicles painted within the boring grayscale – black, white, gray and silver. The last four cars I bought were maroon, green, orange and, yes, white.

So, it’s encouraging to see the car market sort of agrees with my colorful thinking. Predictable shades don’t resell as well as flashier hues, either locally or across the nation.

Just look at the top of the iSeeCar’s color scorecard.

Yellow vehicles were No.1 in Southern California for holding their value with an average depreciation rate of 15.4% over three years. Nationally it was 13.5%. Those dips in value are far smaller than depreciation rates for all cars – 20.5% locally and 22.5% in the U.S.

“A color like yellow is particularly popular with coupe and convertible buyers, and you see plenty of those on the streets and highways of Southern California,” said Karl Brauer, iSeeCars executive analyst.

Conversely, black was the worst performer of 13 colors tracked across Southern California with 22.4% depreciation. Black was third-worst in the U.S. at 23.9%.

“Black is certainly common in Southern California, as any casual glance of the roads will confirm – but its high availability hurts it in the supply-versus-demand curve,” Brauer said. “I also think Southern California’s culture is even more friendly toward expressive colors vs. muted colors than the national average, further helping yellow, orange, and other bright tones.”

Ponder that other grayscale colors fared only slightly better …

No. 7 White: 20.1% depreciation locally vs. No. 6 nationally, at 21.9%.

No. 8 Gray: 20.1% depreciation locally vs. the same ranking nationally, at 22.5%.

No. 9 Silver: 20.5% depreciation locally vs. No. 10 nationally, at 23.2%.

But not every offbeat color does well. Look at what resells as poorly as grayscale …

No. 12 Purple: 22% depreciation locally vs. No. 9 nationally, at 22.7%.

No. 11 Gold: 21.4% locally vs. No. 13 nationally, at 25.9%.

No. 10 Brown: 21.3% locally vs. No. 12 nationally, at 24%.

The top of the ranking, though, includes some bold colors …

No. 2 Green: 18.2% depreciation locally vs. No. 4 nationally, at 19.2%.

No. 3 Beige: 18.3% locally vs. No. 2 nationally, at 17.8%.

No. 4 Red: 18.6% locally vs. No. 5 nationally, at 20.6%.

No. 5 Orange: 19% locally vs. No. 3 nationally, at 18.4%.

No. 6 Blue: 20.1% locally vs. No. 7 nationally, at 22%.

Sadly, California’s reputation for exotic tastes in the car models doesn’t extend to the paint. Last year I noted that Golden State buyers are fairly boring when it comes to their car-color choices. OK, some might say they’re simply practical.

A 2022 study by iSeeCars found only 17% of California autos were outside of grayscale colors, the lowest among the states and below the 22% U.S. share.

Jonathan Lansner is the business columnist for the Southern California News Group. He can be reached at [email protected]

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​ Orange County Register 

How married actors Jazmyn Simon and Dulé Hill were inspired to write a children’s book

• July 3, 2023

When her daughter Kennedy was young, Jazmyn Simon would say affirmations with the child each day in hopes it would help develop her confidence and self-esteem.

“I thought, ‘Well, this seems like it would be great for a young woman to know all the wonderful things about herself,” Simon says. “So let’s start now. And so every single day, before she got out of my car at school, we would do this set of affirmations.”

A decade later in the tumultuous summer of 2020, the pandemic and protests for racial justice were inescapable. Simon was now married to fellow actor Dulé Hill, who had adopted Kennedy, 15 at that time, and together they had 1-year-old son Levi.

“We were in a really dark place in our world and in our country,” says Simon, who is best known for her work on TV series such as “Ballers,” “Psych,” and “Raising Dion.” “It came to watching George Floyd get murdered over and over on TV. Our son was in my lap and I thought, ‘He can’t really articulate his thoughts yet, I wonder what he’s thinking by seeing this.

“So one, let’s cut off the TV off; and two, let’s ask Kennedy how she’s feeling about everything,” she continues. “She said, ‘I’m fine,’ and her dad said, ‘Well, fine’s not a feeling, so how are you feeling?’ She burst into tears and we have this really emotional conversation.”

Simon realized that even when kids seem outwardly fine they might not be. Especially in times like these.

“I turned to Dulé and said, “I don’t want people to see the worst of themselves when they see TV and believe that’s who they are,’” Simon says. “For young Black people, you saw George Floyd getting murdered. For young White people, you saw a White man killing a Black person on TV. It’s a two-sided coin and I didn’t want them to think that that was them.

“So I said, ‘We need to write a book to remind kids that they are the best of themselves and not the worst that they see on TV,” Simon says. “I ran to our junk drawer and I took out – and I’m not joking – I took out a yellow sticky notepad and a pen and I said ‘Let’s write a book.’

“And that’s how it all began.”

The book, “Repeat After Me: Big Things to Say Every Day,” is out now with words by Simon and Hill and illustrations by Shamar Knight-Justice. Simon and Hill will appear at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena for a special storytime book event at 11 a.m. Sunday, July 9.

Positively powerful

Hill, who currently stars on “The Wonder Years” and previously enjoyed long runs on “The West Wing” and “Psyche,” says he’s used to his wife coming up with an idea and jumping into action.

“I probably was in shock at the audacity of the statement,” he says. “But knowing Jazmyn, it wasn’t surprising to me, because when she sets her mind to do something she gets it done. For myself, I said, ‘OK,’ and went along for the ride. ‘This what we’re doing, so here we go.’”

Both Hill and Simon laugh – “That’s exactly what he said,” she adds – before he continues.

“I say this often – it’s very easy for me to become a partner to Jazmyn Simon because she’s a wonderful writer,” Hill says. “All I have to do is say, ‘You know what, baby, I think you’re missing a period there. I think we need a comma. I don’t know if that rhymes as well as it could. Why don’t ‘we’ go back and revisit that.’”

Simon remembered many of the affirmations she’d used with Kennedy when she was a child. Now those were workshopped on Levi, and still are used with him today, to see which would best be used in the children’s book.

“If he’s feeling nervous about something, we’ll start with ‘I am brave’ or ‘I am courageous,’” she says of their son, who turned 4 this spring. “In the same way with Kennedy, ones we always used were, ‘We’re loved, worthy, ready.’”

The book, as with their at-home affirmations, avoids physical attributes and other subjective terms.

“We don’t want anybody to feel like their self-worth was determined, like ‘I am pretty’ or ‘I am beautiful’ or things like that,” Simon says. “Anything subjective, we tried to take it off the page, because everybody is beautiful and everybody is smart.

“We took all of those out and just tried to make it as pure as we could,” she says.

“We worked to make sure the message could reach everybody,” Hill says. “So that everyone who reads it, or everyone who has it read to them, can hear the words and find the value in themselves through the words that are being shared.”

Seeds for the self

The messages in the book can benefit not only the child to whom it is read but the adult reading it, Simon and Hill believe.

“It’s more than just saying these are the words that you can express yourself,” Simon says. “It’s that I am taking time with you to tell you how valuable you are, how important you are, how deserving you are. ‘I am deserving.’ What does that mean? You’re deserving of someone that’s going to listen to you. And that’s where conversations happen.”

To Hill, the purpose of the affirmations and the book is to “plant seeds of positivity,” he says.

“And hopefully, as life goes on, they will blossom up and have roots, take roots in young lives of the children who are hearing the words, and also in the lives of the adults who are reading the words,” Hill says.

“Because life is going to send you a whole bunch of negative messages,” he says. “The older you get the more you’re going to start hearing and seeing how you’re not enough, how you’re less than, how you need to be this or that.

“The whole goal of this is that hopefully it can plant some seeds as these children are growing up,” Hill says. “They will know that they are like every good thing. They are gifted, they are enough’ they are ready, they are light.

“And they can take that forward as they go forth into their life.”

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Sacramento Snapshot: Anthony Rendon passes the speaker’s gavel, marking the end of an era in California politics

• July 3, 2023

Editor’s note: Sacramento Snapshot is a weekly series during the legislative session detailing what Orange County’s representatives in the Assembly and Senate are working on — from committee work to bill passages and more.

Anthony Rendon is not done speaking.

The Lakewood Democrat (not the Angels third baseman) passed on the powerful speaker’s gavel Friday, June 30, marking the end of an era in California politics. In the leadership position since 2016, Rendon is California’s second-longest-serving speaker in state history.

But Rendon is still a legislator — he doesn’t term out until 2024 — and that means he’s not done with his work. He’ll reportedly attend committee hearings, maybe author some legislation, but not frequent caucus meetings to give new Speaker Robert Rivas the opportunity to guide on his own.

At this point, there’s not much to say about Rendon’s long tenure as speaker — a time that saw 157 people come through the Assembly, noted Alex Vassar, a legislative historian with the California State Library — that hasn’t already been written. He led legislators through the COVID-19 pandemic, the #MeToo movement, Capitol renovations and office relocations, the Trump administration and more.

He empowered committee chairs to take ownership of legislation, rarely authoring any himself. (For comparison, former Speaker John Pérez authored 45 bills, 24 of which were signed into law during the 2013-14 session; Rendon authored two procedural resolutions in 2021-22, according to Vassar.)

“All decisions were moral decisions,” Rendon said in an interview Friday as he was getting ready to head to the airport to travel back home. “I think the best legislators are the ones who boil things down and make it as simple as possible and ask: ‘Is this the right thing to do?’”

Sacramento Snapshot: Speaker Rendon looks to more oversight work this year

Of course, none of it was without controversy. Even the handing of the baton to Rivas, the Salinas Democrat whose name now adorns the Speaker’s Office in the statehouse, was the culmination of a bruising power struggle.

If you ask Rendon, he likens his time as speaker to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” novel, a story not marked by cohesive sections but rather an almost helter-skelter storyline. “It doesn’t seem like the same experience,” he says.

In retrospect — something Rendon has been considering of late — it’s the pandemic chapter that changed the legislature the most. Even now, with vaccines readily available and socialization less and less taboo again, legislators aren’t getting together as much, he said.

“Once the quarantine happened, people just got out of the habit of going out and hanging out as members. It changed the dynamic between the executive branch and the legislative branch,” Rendon said. “It very, very much changed the job.”

Rendon is acutely aware of how far Sacramento is from Southern California — his 400-mile flight between his Los Angeles County district and Sacramento often felt more akin to 1,000 miles, he joked. But for residents like those in his district, like those in Orange County even, that distance can amplify constituents’ voices, he said.

“The best way to cut down on the abstraction — and state government can be incredibly abstract — is to talk to your legislator, and your legislator will notice because of the isolation that is Sacramento,” Rendon advised. “Legislators are more accessible than you think.”

Looking ahead, Rendon is looking forward to becoming a regular ol’ legislator for a bit.

“I spent 20-some years in the nonprofit sector doing administration, and I came to the Assembly and spent three years as a legislator and loved it because it was so different than running a nonprofit. It was so incredibly different than administration and HR and budgeting,” said Rendon. “It was three great years, and then I was like, ‘Oh, it’s back to HR and administration and facilities and hiring and firing.’”

It was a “cruelly short glimpse into another life,” Rendon said, “I’m excited about going back to that aspect of the legislature.”

In other news

The governor signed two bills last week from Orange County legislators, both dealing with education.

One was Assemblymember Tri Ta’s legislation requiring school districts to notify nearby community colleges when a college or career fair is planned. Specifically, districts would need to notify community college districts with overlapping jurisdictions.

The Westminster Republican’s bill comes as enrollment in the California Community College system has declined.

“California’s community colleges play a crucial role in educating the state’s future workforce and providing an accessible education for Californians,” said Ta.

The governor also OK’d Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva’s bill updating California statute with the teaching credential program local school agencies must provide to braille instructional aides. It was backed by the California Teachers Association.

“This vital bill ensures that California statutes are updated to accurately identify the teaching credential pathway program for braille instructional aides, addressing the teacher shortage crisis, particularly in special education,” said Quirk-Silva. “Our most vulnerable students with the greatest needs often have the least qualified teachers, and this legislation is a crucial step in providing expert educators for all students, with equity and inclusion.”

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Novak Djokovic’s bid for Wimbledon title No. 8 and Grand Slam trophy No. 24 starts on Monday

• July 3, 2023

By HOWARD FENDRICH (AP Tennis Writer)

WIMBLEDON, England — Listen to Novak Djokovic’s opponents explain why he is as successful as he is – why he will begin his pursuit of a fifth consecutive and eighth overall Wimbledon championship on Monday; why he also will be attempting to claim an Open era-record 24th Grand Slam trophy over the coming fortnight on the All England Club’s grass courts – and they’ll offer plenty of answers.

His best-in-the-game return of serve. His dangerous two-handed backhand. His elasticity. His stamina. His defense. His ability to read someone else’s intentions, get to where a ball is headed and send it back with force, a combination Casper Ruud described this way after losing to Djokovic in the French Open final: “He sort of just goes into this mode where he just becomes, like, a wall.”

Listen to Novak Djokovic explain why he’s done what he’s done and why, at age 36, he’s still doing it, and he’ll offer a reason far less tangible and far less observable, something he mentioned during his victory speech at Roland Garros a few weeks ago.

“I try to visualize every single thing in my life and not only believe it, but really feel it with every cell in my body. And I just want to send a message out there to every young person: Be in the present moment; forget about what happened in the past; the future is something that is just going to happen,” Djokovic said. “But if you want a better future, you create it. Take the means in your hands. Believe it. Create it.”

Speaking that day about his own hopes and dreams as a 7-year-old kid, Djokovic noted two primary goals: getting to No. 1 and winning Wimbledon.

He’s already been No. 1 for more weeks than any man or woman in the half-century of computerized rankings. Now he will try to pull even with Roger Federer by earning title No. 8 at the oldest of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments. Djokovic is one ahead of the injured Rafael Nadal – and three ahead of the retired Federer – for the most singles majors won by a man, with 23.

“Those two guys,” said Djokovic, who faces Pedro Cachin of Argentina at Centre Court on Monday, “were occupying my mind for the last 15 years quite a lot.”

His 23 is the same number Serena Williams ended her career with last season; only Margaret Court, who won 24 across both the amateur and professional eras, has more.

“Grand Slams are the goal. I don’t know how many, but I think he has in his body a lot more,” said Djokovic’s coach, Goran Ivanisevic. “It’s fascinating to see, because sometimes you think, ‘OK, now you have 23.’ But he’s going to find, again, some kind of motivation to win 24, maybe 25. Who knows where is the end?”

Entering the 2011 season, the so-called Big Three’s Slam standings looked like this: Federer with 16, Nadal with nine, Djokovic with one.

After winning his initial major title at the 2008 Australian Open, Djokovic went through an 11-major span where four of the losses came against Federer or Nadal in a semifinal or final.

His self-confidence waned a bit.

“That’s where I was really doubting myself, whether I could do it or not, because you get far but then you fall on the last hurdle,” Djokovic said. “The more times you kind of fall, the more you question everything, you know what I mean?”

And yet, with the same tenacity he uses on a court – “The mental fortitude he has is unbelievable,” was how his first-round opponent in Paris, Aleksandar Kovacevic, put it – Djokovic dug in away from the court and found ways to improve. And still does that, which is part of why most consider him, and not top-seeded Carlos Alcaraz, the favorite as Djokovic continues to pursue the first calendar-year Grand Slam by a man since Rod Laver in 1969.

“The thing that you have to admire about him is that he’s been very clear on what it is that he wants to achieve – trying to get that Grand Slam record. When he put himself in a position to do that, he delivered,” said Andy Murray, who won two of his three major titles at Wimbledon. “He didn’t look like he was getting nervous or overthinking it or any of those things. Yeah, he went and did it. It shows the strength of character that he’s got.”

So where did this belief come from?

Djokovic points to several factors: his upbringing during a time of war and embargo in Serbia in the 1990s; his parents (“95-plus percent of people … were laughing at them, and were discouraging them to spend whatever is left over from the family budget into such an expensive sport,” he said); his first coach and “tennis mother,” Jelena Genčić; and a later coach and “tennis father,” Niki Pilić.

All helped him grow as an athlete and person.

When he was 7 or 8, Djokovic said, Genčić would show him videos of the best male and female tennis players. She also taught him “the importance of relaxing and listening to classical music, reading poetry, singing, and reading, breathing consciously and so forth.”

His mother, he said, “is a rock,” and his father “instilled in me such power of belief and positive thinking.”

That, as much as any particular shot or talent, is why, Djokovic says, “On a daily basis, I’m the best on the court.”

It’s why he has won 11 of the past 20 Grand Slam tournaments.

And it’s why he wants to keep going.

“I don’t feel more relaxed, to be honest. I still feel hungry for success, for more Grand Slams, more achievements in tennis. As long as there’s that drive, I know that I’m able to compete at the highest level,” Djokovic said. “A few days after Roland Garros, I was already thinking about preparation for grass and what needs to be done.”

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