Tropical rainstorms in South Florida lead to flight delays, streets jammed with stalled cars

• June 14, 2024

By FREIDA FRISARO, TERRY SPENCER and DANIEL KOZIN

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A tropical disturbance that brought a rare flash flood emergency to much of southern Florida delayed flights at two of the state’s largest airports and left vehicles waterlogged and stalled in some of the region’s lowest-lying streets.

“Looked like the beginning of a zombie movie,” said Ted Rico, a tow truck driver who spent much of Wednesday night and Thursday morning helping to clear the streets of stalled vehicles. “There’s cars littered everywhere, on top of sidewalks, in the median, in the middle of the street, no lights on. Just craziness, you know. Abandoned cars everywhere.”

Rico, of One Master Trucking Corp., was born and raised in Miami and said he was ready for the emergency.

“You know when its coming,” he said. “Every year it’s just getting worse, and for some reason people just keep going through the puddles.”

Travelers across the area were trying to adjust their plans on Thursday morning. More than 20 inches (50 centimeters) of rain has fallen in some areas of South Florida since Tuesday, with more predicted over the next few days.

Ticket and security lines snaked around a domestic concourse at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport just before noon Thursday. The travel boards showed about half of that terminal’s flights had been canceled or postponed.

Bill Carlisle, a Navy petty officer first class, had spent his morning trying to catch a flight back to Norfolk, Virginia. He had arrived at Miami International Airport at about 6:30 a.m., but 90 minutes later he was still in line and realized he couldn’t get his bags checked and through security in time to catch his flight.

“It was a zoo,” said Carlisle, a public affairs specialist. He was speaking for himself, not the Navy. “Nothing against the (airport) employees — there is only so much they can do.”

So he used his phone to book an afternoon flight out of Fort Lauderdale. He took a shuttle the 20 miles north, only to find that flight had been canceled. He was now heading back to Miami for a 9 p.m. flight, hoping it wouldn’t get canceled by the heavy rains expected later in the day. He was resigned, not angry.

“Just a long day sitting in airports,” Carlisle said. “This is kind of par for the course for government travel.”

Wednesday’s downpours and subsequent flooding blocked roads, floated vehicles and even delayed the Florida Panthers on their way to Stanley Cup games in Canada against the Edmonton Oilers.

The disorganized storm system was pushing across Florida from the Gulf of Mexico at roughly the same time as the early June start of hurricane season, which this year is forecast to be among the most active in recent memory amid concerns that climate change is increasing storm intensity.

The disturbance has not reached cyclone status and was given only a slight chance to form into a tropical system once it moves into the Atlantic Ocean after crossing Florida, according to the National Hurricane Center.

In Hallandale Beach, Alex Demchemko, was walking his Russian spaniel Lex along the still-flooded sidewalks near the Airbnb where he’s lived after arriving from Russia last month to seek asylum in the U.S.

“We didn’t come out from our apartment, but we had to walk with our dog,” Demchemko said. “A lot of flashes, raining, a lot of floating cars and a lot of left cars without drivers, and there was a lot of water on the streets. It was kind of catastrophic.”

On Thursday morning, Daniela Urrieche, 26, was bailing water out of her SUV, which got stuck on a flooded street as she drove home from work on Wednesday afternoon.

“In the nine years that I’ve lived here, this has been the worst,” she said. “Even in a hurricane, streets were not as bad as it was in the past 24 hours.”

The flooding wasn’t limited to the streets. Charlea Johnson spent Wednesday night at her Hallendale Beach home barreling water into the sink and toilet.

“The water just started flooding in the back and flooding in the front,” Johnson said.

By Wednesday evening, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and mayors in Fort Lauderdale , Hollywood and Miami-Dade County each declared a state of emergency.

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It’s already been a wet and blustery week in Florida. In Miami, about 6 inches (15 centimeters) of rain fell Tuesday and 7 inches (17 centimeters) fell in Miami Beach, according to the National Weather Service. Hollywood got about 5 inches (12 centimeters).

More rain was forecast for the rest of the week, with some areas getting another 6 inches (15 centimeters) of rain.

The western side of the state, much of which has been in a prolonged drought, also got some major rainfall. Nearly 6.5 inches (16.5 centimeters) of rain fell Tuesday at Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, the weather service says, and flash flood warnings were in effect in those areas as well.

Forecasts predict an unusually busy hurricane season.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates there is an 85% chance that the Atlantic hurricane season will be above average, predicting between 17 and 25 named storms in the coming months including up to 13 hurricanes and four major hurricanes. An average season has 14 named storms.

Associated Press writers Curt Anderson in St. Petersburg and Stephany Matat, in Hallandale Beach, contributed to this story.

​ Orange County Register 

Many young adults who began vaping as teens can’t shake the habit

• June 13, 2024

G Kumar’s vaping addiction peaked in college at the University of Colorado, when flavored, disposable vapes were taking off.

“I’d go through, let’s say, 1,200 puffs in a week,” Kumar said.

Vaping became a crutch for them. Like losing a cellphone, losing a vape pen would set off a mad scramble.

“It needs to be right next to my head when I fall asleep at night, and then in the morning, I have to thrash through the sheets and pick it up and find it,” Kumar recalled.

They got sick often, including catching covid-19 — and vaping through all of it.

Kumar, now 24, eventually quit. But many of their generation can’t shake the habit.

“Everyone knows it’s not good for you and everyone wants to stop,” said Jacob Garza, a University of Colorado student who worked to raise awareness about substance use as part of the school’s health promotion program.

“But at this point, doing it all these years … it’s just second nature now,” he said.

Marketing by e-cigarette companies, touting the allure of fruity or candy-like flavors and names, led many teens to try vaping. As more high schoolers and younger kids experimented with e-cigarettes, physicians and researchers warned it could lead to widespread addiction, creating a “Generation Vape.”

Research has shown nicotine is highly rewarding to the brains of young people.

New data on substance use among adults ages 18-24 suggests that many former teen vapers remain e-cigarette users. National vaping rates for young adults increased from 7.6% in 2018 to 11% in 2021.

It’s not surprising that many of them start in high school for social reasons, for all sorts of reasons,” said Delaney Ruston, a primary care physician and documentary filmmaker. “And many of them now — we’re seeing this — have continued to college and beyond.”

Her latest film is “Screenagers Under the Influence: Addressing Vaping, Drugs & Alcohol in the Digital Age.”

In Colorado, the share of those 18 to 24 who regularly vaped rose by about 61% from 2020 to 2022 — to nearly a quarter of that age group.

“That’s an astounding increase in just two years,” Ruston said.

Trends in that state are worth noting because, before the pandemic, Colorado led the nation in youth vaping among high school students, surpassing 36 other states surveyed.

Nationally, vaping rates among high schoolers dropped from 28% in 2019 to 10% in 2023, according to the Annual National Youth Tobacco Survey. But for many young people who started vaping at the height of the trend, a habit was set.

At Children’s Hospital Colorado, pediatric pulmonologist Heather De Keyser displayed on her screen a clouded X-ray of the lung of a young adult damaged by vaping.

For years, doctors like her and public health experts wondered about the potentially harmful impact of vaping on pre-adult bodies and brains — especially the big risk of addiction.

“I think, unfortunately, those lessons that we were worried we were going to be learning, we’re learning,” said De Keyser, an associate professor of pediatrics in the Breathing Institute at Children’s Hospital Colorado.

“We’re seeing increases in those young adults. They weren’t able to stop.”

It’s no coincidence the vaping rates soared during the pandemic, according to several public health experts.

For the past couple of years, undergraduates have talked about the challenges of isolation and using more substances, said Alyssa Wright, who manages early intervention health promotion programs at CU-Boulder.

“Just being home, being bored, being a little bit anxious, not knowing what’s happening in the world,” Wright said. “We don’t have that social connection, and it feels like people are still even trying to catch up from that experience.”

Other factors driving addiction are the high nicotine levels in vaping devices, and “stealth culture,” said Chris Lord, CU-Boulder’s associate director of the Collegiate Recovery Center.

“The products they were using had five times more nicotine than previous vapes had,” he said. “So getting hooked on that was … almost impossible to avoid.”

By “stealth culture,” Lord means that vaping is exciting, something forbidden and secret. “As an adolescent, our brains are kind of wired that way, a lot of us,” Lord said.

All over the U.S., state and local governments have filed suits against Juul Labs, alleging the company misrepresented the health risks of its products.

The lawsuits argued that Juul became a top e-cigarette company by aggressively marketing directly to kids, who then spread the word themselves by posting to social media sites like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

“What vaping has done, getting high schoolers, in some cases even middle schoolers, hooked on vaping, is now playing out,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.

Juul agreed to pay hundreds of millions in settlements. The company did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

R.J. Reynolds, which makes another popular vape brand, Vuse, sent this statement: “We steer clear of youth enticing flavors, such as bubble gum and cotton candy, providing a stark juxtaposition to illicit disposable vapor products.”

Other big vape companies, like Esco Bar, Elf Bar, Breeze Smoke, and Puff Bar, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“If we lived in an ideal world, adults would reach the age of 24 without ever having experimented with adult substances. In reality, young adults experiment,” said Greg Conley, director of legislative and external affairs with American Vapor Manufacturers. “This predates the advent of nicotine vaping.”

The FDA banned flavored vape cartridges in 2020 to crack down on marketing to minors, but the products are still easy to find.

Joe Miklosi, a consultant to the Rocky Mountain Smoke-Free Alliance, a trade group for vape shops, contends the shops are not driving vaping rates among young adults in Colorado. “We keep demographic data in our 125 stores. Our average age [of customers] is 42,” he said.

He has spoken with thousands of consumers who say vaping helped them quit smoking cigarettes, he said. Vape shops sell products to help adult smokers quit, Miklosi said.

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Colorado statistics belie that claim, according to longtime tobacco researcher Stanton Glantz. The data is “completely inconsistent with the argument that most e-cigarette use is adult smokers trying to use them to quit,” said Glantz, the former director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California-San Francisco.

For recent college graduate G Kumar, now a rock climber, the impetus to quit vaping was more ecological than health-related. They said they were turned off by the amount of trash generated from used vape devices and the amount of money they were spending.

Kumar got help from cessation literature and quitting aids from the university’s health promotion program, including boxes of eucalyptus-flavored toothpicks, which tasted awful but provided a distraction and helped with oral cravings.

It took a while and a lot of willpower to overcome the intense psychological cravings.

“The fact that I could just gnaw on toothpicks for weeks on end was, I think, what kept me sane,” Kumar said.

This article is from a partnership that includes CPR News, NPR, and KFF Health News.

​ Orange County Register 

Horse racing notes: Santa Anita finale features marathon rematch

• June 13, 2024

SANTA ANITA LEADERS

(Through Sunday)

Jockeys / Wins

Antonio Fresu / 29

Juan Hernandez / 26

Kyle Frey / 24

Umberto Rispoli / 20

Edwin Maldonado / 18

Trainers / Wins

Phil D’Amato / 17

Mark Glatt / 13

Steve Knapp /12

Doug O’Neill / 12

John Sadler / 11

WEEKEND STAKES

SANTA ANITA

Saturday

• $100,000 Possibly Perfect Stakes, fillies and mares, 3-year-olds and up, 1¼ miles on turf

Sunday

• $100,000, Grade III San Juan Capistrano Stakes, 3-year-olds and up, about 1¾ miles on turf

LOS ALAMITOS

Saturday

• $100,000, Abigail Kawananakoa Handicap, quarter-horse fillies and mares, 3-year-olds and up, 350 yards

Sunday

• $1 million, Grade I Ed Burke Million Futurity, 2-year-old quarter horses, 350 yards

DOWN THE STRETCH

• Santa Anita’s season-ending, four-day racing week climaxes Sunday with the San Juan Capistrano, featuring a rematch of 2023 1-2-3 finishers Planetario (Hector Berrios riding), Offlee Naughty (Juan Hernandez) and Rimprotector (Kyle Frey). A six-horse field will make four turns, the first of those right-handed on the turf hillside, in the 1¾-mile marathon.

• Sunday night’s Ed Burke Million, the first of four million-dollar races for quarter horses at Los Alamitos this year, features top qualifier Up To Party, Kindergarten Futurity runner-up My Budd, unbeaten Big Hurt, Laredeaux and Norco.

• Golden Gate Fields ran the last races in its 83-year history Sunday in front of 5,936 fans. The finale was won by Adelie ($13), shipped north by D’Amato to rally from last in a one-mile turf race under leading Golden Gate jockey Assael Espinoza. When the closure of the Albany, Calif., track was announced in 2023, it was said to be “aimed at consolidating, invigorating and innovating racing throughout Southern California.” But racing journalist Ray Paulick points out that none of the 149 horses entered at Santa Anita on Thursday and Friday came in from Golden Gate. Pleasanton opens a three-week county-fair meet Friday with six races, none bigger than seven horses.

• Abel Cedillo and Joe Talamo are back in Southern California after stints in Kentucky. Cedillo, 35, was among the circuit’s top jockeys from 2019 to 2023, and finished third in wins at Turfway Park’s recent winter-spring meet. Talamo, 34, won the Eclipse Award as North America’s best apprentice jockey and 23 Grade I stakes when he rode here from 2007 to 2020 before going to the Midwest.

• After Sugar Fish won Saturday’s Summertime Oaks, co-owner Kim Lloyd praised trainer Jeff Mullins for turning around the 3-year-old filly’s career: “I’ve got to tell you, Jeff Mullins is as fine a horseman as there is in the country, and I’m not exaggerating,” said Lloyd, who trained in California from 1987 to 2002. Mullins’ 27% win rate is the best among trainers at Santa Anita’s Hollywood Meet.

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• Racing-related equine fatalities declined 38% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023 at tracks operating under Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority rules, occurring at a rate of 0.84 per 1,000 starts, HISA reported. “While even one fatality is too many, we are pleased to see the progress we are making,” HISA CEO Lisa Lazarus tweeted.

• The Belmont Stakes drew $60.9 million in bets Saturday, the highest handle since Justify completed his Triple Crown in 2018. Held at Saratoga while Belmont Park is being renovated, the Belmont had a 10-horse field featuring Kentucky Derby winner Mystik Dan, Preakness winner Seize the Grey and four other horses out of those races, including winner Dornoch ($37.40).

— Kevin Modesti

​ Orange County Register 

Biden to join Obama, salvo of Hollywood star power Saturday in LA

• June 13, 2024

President Joe Biden is coming to Hollywood on Saturday, surrounding himself with big-name celebrities led by late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel who will interview him at a live event, along with former President Barack Obama and mega-stars George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

The Biden re-election campaign hopes to top the haul from a similar, celebrity-studded campaign stop in New York City in March, when he was interviewed by Stephen Colbert, host of “Late Night with Stephen Colbert.” That event included Obama, former president Bill Clinton, and several Broadway stars. It raised $25 million for Biden’s campaign.

But many say there’s nothing better than a Los Angeles gathering of superstars to pad the campaign’s cash reserves. And California, a blue state projected as an easy win for the president, will play a familiar role for out-of-state candidates.

“California has been called the ATM machine of national politics,” said Joel Fox, adjunct professor at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University on Thursday, June 13.

“They come out to California to collect money to spend someplace else,” Fox added. “The state serves as an ATM for the Republican side, too, it is consistent.” He was referring to former President Donald Trump’s recent fundraising stop in Beverly Hills.

Trump and the Republican Party outraised Biden in April, raking in $76 million as compared to $51 million for Biden and the Democratic National Committee that same month. Biden said he had a $192 million war chest at the end of April, the same as previous months, meaning he appears to be spending it as fast as it comes in.

For example, Biden on June 13 launched a seven-figure ad in Spanish and English in battleground states on “lowering costs for food and rent,” raising wages and creating jobs, the campaign reported. Campaign ads are rarely aired in California.

FILE – In this Jan. 4, 2017 file photo, then Vice President Joe Biden, left, watches then President Barack Obama, center, at Conmy Hall, Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Va. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Some wonder if hob-knobbing with rich celebrities sends the wrong message to Black and Brown voters struggling to make ends meet. Los Angeles County Democratic Party Chair Mark Gonzalez disagreed.

“Celebrities support good union jobs,” he said, noting the Biden calls himself the most supportive union president in American history. “They contribute to the local economy. Film industry brings taxes to Los Angeles.” He noted some country western performers support Trump. These include: Jason Aldean, Toby Keith and Kid Rock.

Kimmel has risen from a radio career and later, a half-hour show on Comedy Central, “The Man Show” that featured testosterone-infused sketches of beer-chugging guys, female models bouncing on trampolines and toilet jokes. He has been host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC-TV since 2003, and mixes humor with serious talk.

On June 8, 2022, he interviewed President Biden on the show not long after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children and two teachers were killed. The two discussed gun background checks. More recently, Vice President Kamala Harris was a guest.

Gonzalez said Kimmel brings Biden’s message to a younger voting bloc — those under 45. Though born in Brooklyn, he moved to Las Vegas, Nev. with his family as a child, where he attended college and became a deejay.

“His name is connected to the campaign,” Gonzalez said. “Growing up in Nevada, a swing state, can appeal to Nevada voters. Now in California, he is a validator and has an audience who can put their support behind the president.”

Kimmel has publicly sparred with Trump. On social media, the presumptive Republican nominee heavily criticized his performance as host of the 2023 and 2024 Academy Awards shows. During the last show, Kimmel read the social media slam, then ended  with this quip: “Isn’t it past your jail time?”

This Saturday event will take place after Trump has been convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an effort to conceal a hush-money payment to a porn star with whom he allegedly had sex. Prosecutors said it was a cover-up to prevent voters in 2016 from learning about the extra-marital affair.

It also comes just a few days after the president’s son, Hunter Biden, was convicted of three felony firearm charges involving lying on a mandatory gun purchase form by saying he was not illegally using or addicted to drugs, and illegally having the gun for 11 days.

Whether either issue will be raised by Kimmel remains a question. Kimmel’s public relations team, and Biden’s campaign both did not return emails. Gonzalez said asking about the president’s son would be “uncouth” and “irrelevant.” “His son isn’t running for president,” he said.

A Biden campaign aide told People magazine that Kimmel will ask about democracy issues, abortion rights and Obamacare and the GOP’s failed attempts to kill it. Kimmel may discuss his son, Billy, who had open heart surgery shortly after birth. On his show, he said no one should be denied healthcare because they can’t afford it, and uplifted the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

The event is selling tickets by donations via Eventbrite, at a not-yet-disclosed venue. Last week, it was reported Biden would attend a fundraiser at the Peacock Theater in LA Live! The invitation said the campaign will accept tickets selling from $0 to $500,000.

Fox said celebrities mixing with presidential candidates can give a campaign a jolt, but they really don’t add new voters.

“I don’t think it moves the needle much at all,” he said. “It could have some effect but ultimately, it comes down to politics and policy.”

Fox, who was a senior aide to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said at a San Diego rally, people lined a shopping plaza to catch a glimpse of the movie star, not the politician.

“The vote comes down to who is best for me in the economy, who is best for me in terms of my safety, for immigration and the wars overseas,” Fox said.

Celebrities and campaigns are not a new marriage. Ronald Reagan was a movie actor who ran successfully for governor, then president, he said.

“It’s not a new story that celebrities get involved with presidential candidates. It goes back to that famous singing of Happy Birthday by Marilyn Monroe to JFK,” Fox said.

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​ Orange County Register 

Elon Musk wins back his $44.9 billion Tesla pay package in shareholder vote

• June 13, 2024

By TOM KRISHER and DAVID HAMILTON | AP Business Writers

DETROIT — Tesla shareholders voted Thursday to restore CEO Elon Musk’s record $44.9 billion pay package that was thrown out by a Delaware judge earlier this year, sending a strong vote of confidence in his leadership of the electric vehicle maker.

The favorable vote doesn’t necessarily mean that Musk will get the all-stock compensation anytime soon. The package is likely to remain tied up in the Delaware Chancery Court and Supreme Court for months as Tesla tries to overturn the Delaware judge’s rejection.

Musk has raised doubts about his future with Tesla this year, writing on X, the social media platform he owns, that he wanted a 25% stake in the company in order to stop him from taking artificial intelligence development elsewhere. The higher stake is needed to control the use of AI, he has said.

Tesla also has struggled with falling sales and profit margins as demand for electric vehicles slows worldwide.

But at the company’s annual meeting Thursday in Austin, Texas, Musk reassured shareholders that he will stick around, telling them he can’t sell any stock in the compensation package for five years.

“It’s not actually cash, and I can’t cut and run, nor would I want to,” he said.

Vote totals on Musk’s pay weren’t immediately announced at Tesla’s annual stockholders’ meeting, but the company said shareholders voted for Musk’s compensation plan, which initially was approved by the board and stockholders six years ago.

Tesla last valued the package at $44.9 billion in an April regulatory filing. It was once as much as $56 billion but has declined in value in tandem with Tesla’s stock, which has dropped about 40% in the last 12 months.

Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick ruled in January in a shareholder’s lawsuit that Musk essentially controlled the Tesla board when it ratified the package in 2018, and that it failed to fully inform shareholders who approved it the same year.

Tesla has said it would appeal, but asked shareholders to reapprove the package at Thursday’s annual meeting.

A separate vote approved moving the company’s legal home to Texas to avoid the courts in Delaware, where Tesla is registered as a corporation.

“Its incredible,” a jubilant Musk told the crowd gathered at Tesla’s headquarters and large factory in Austin, Texas. “I think we’re not just opening a new chapter for Tesla, we’re starting a new book.”

Legal experts say the issue of Musk’s pay will still be decided in Delaware, largely because Musk’s lawyers have assured McCormick they won’t try to move the case to Texas.

But they differ on whether the new approval of the pay package will make it easier for Tesla to get it approved.

Charles Elson, a retired professor and founder of the corporate governance center at the University of Delaware, said he doesn’t think the vote will influence McCormick, who issued a decision based on the law.

McCormick’s ruling essentially made the 2018 compensation package a gift to Musk, Elson said, and that would need unanimous shareholder approval, an impossible threshold. The vote, he said, is interesting from a public perception standpoint, but “in my view it does not affect the ruling.”

John Lawrence, a Dallas-based lawyer with Baker Botts who defends corporations against shareholder lawsuits, agreed that the vote doesn’t end the legal dispute and automatically give Musk the stock options. But he says it gives Tesla a strong argument to get the ruling overturned.

He expects Musk and Tesla to argue that shareholders were fully informed before the latest votes, so McCormick should reverse her decision. But the plaintiff in the lawsuit will argue that the vote has no impact and isn’t legally binding, Lawrence said.

The vote, he said, was done under Delaware law and should be considered by the judge.

“This shareholder vote is a strong signal that you now have an absolutely well-informed body of shareholders,” he said. “The judge in Delaware still could decide that this doesn’t change a thing about her prior ruling and doesn’t require her to make any different ruling going forward. But I think it definitely gives Tesla and Musk strong ammunition to try to get her to revisit this.”

If the ruling stands, then Musk likely will appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court, Lawrence said.

Earlier Thursday, Tesla disclosed that shareholders were voting for Musk’s pay package by a wide margin. That drove the company’s shares up 3% by the time the markets closed. The stock is down about 25% this year.

After the votes were announced, Musk began telling shareholders about new developments in the company’s “Full Self-Driving” system. He has staked the company’s future on development of autonomous vehicles, robots and artificial intelligence.

“Full Self-Driving” keeps improving with new versions, and there’s no question it will exceed the safety of human drivers, Musk said without giving a time frame.

“This is actually going to work. This is going to happen. Mark my words, this is just a matter of time,” he said.

Despite its name, “Full Self-Driving” can’t drive itself, and the company says human drivers must be ready to intervene at all times. Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” hardware went on sale late in 2015, and Musk has used the name ever since as the company gathered data to teach its computers how to drive.

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In 2019, Musk promised a fleet of autonomous robotaxis by 2020, and he said in early 2022 that the cars would be autonomous that year. In April, Musk said the system should be ready in 2023.

Since 2021, Tesla has been beta-testing “Full Self-Driving” using volunteer owners. U.S. safety regulators last year made Tesla recall the software after finding that the system misbehaved around intersections and could violate traffic laws.

Musk said the company is making huge progress on its Optimus humanoid robot. Currently it has two working at its factory in Fremont, California, that take battery cells off a production line and put them in shipping containers, he said.

Despite laying off the team working on Tesla’s Supercharger electric vehicle charging network, Musk said he thinks the company will deploy more chargers this year “that are actually working” than the rest of the industry. In the second half of the year, he expects to spend $500 million on Superchargers, Musk said.

Hamilton reported from San Francisco.

​ Orange County Register 

How ‘Little Women,’ ‘American Psycho’ and the Kardashians inspired ‘Tehrangeles’

• June 13, 2024

The Milani sisters, daughters of an Iranian American frozen food magnate and would-be reality TV stars, are four very different young women largely confined to their massive, luxurious family home at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Tehrangeles,” a satire of the rich and TikTok-famous from acclaimed author Porochista Khakpour, is named for a cluster of Westside neighborhoods with a large Iranian American community. The novel has been in the works since 2011.

“It was, sort of, for a while, a mischievous response to rejections,” says Khakpour about the novel’s origin during a recent video call. 

Khakpour, whose 2007 debut novel, “Sons and Other Flammable Objects” won the California Book Award for First Fiction, was shopping around her follow-up, but the response wasn’t ideal.

SEE ALSO: Sign up for our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more

“Editors were suggesting and pitching to me what they thought my second novel would be,” she explains. “I had a lot of popular essays at the time that were about Iranian American families and Iranian American women’s experiences, obviously about myself, so they wanted a more Iranian women-focused book, which was not my second novel at all.”

So Khakpour began writing a book with an all-female, all-Iranian American cast simply as a means of entertaining herself. In the process, “Little Women” became a model for the story. “‘Little Women’ was always a book that I couldn’t stand,” she says. “I realized, in my research, that Louisa May Alcott also didn’t enjoy working on it, so that made me more interested.”

Khakpour’s “tendency towards satire” emerged as she drafted and re-drafted versions of what would become “Tehrangeles.” Years passed. She published other books. Then, the pandemic hit. 

“The pandemic just made it really perfect,” she admits. It provided a real-world situation of confinement that worked in Khakpour’s fictional story. But there was another advantage to the setting. “It also gave my characters an opportunity to behave pretty badly,” says Khakpour.

The ringleader in “Tehrangeles,” is Roxanna, the second-born daughter who seems to have more in common with Kim Kardashian than Jo March. Reality TV helped shape the novel as well. 

“I was most interested in the idea of the confessionals,” says Khakpour. “That was a format that I really liked that reality TV offers. You have a front story and the back story is delivered through this confessional format, which I thought was really interesting.”

Within the family home, Khakpour visualizes a life of designer excess that few have seen in person. “There were outfits and furniture and things described in this book that I had never really seen,” she says. “I would have to Google things and encounter designers. I didn’t know that Bentley Home existed or Fendi did a home line.”

Homa, the girls’ mother, spritzes rooms with Caroline’s Four Hundred, the signature fragrance of St. Regis Hotels and Resorts. “That was something that I had encountered in my research,” says Khakpour. “I really couldn’t even imagine it, but it was so specific that I was delighted by it.”

TikTok proved to be handy in Khakpour’s research as well. “I would see all these TikToks talking about [high-end supermarket] Erewhon and fetishizing Erewhon’s horrible prices,” she says.

Heightening the satire, Khakpour, who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, dug into outsider perceptions of L.A. glitz. “The fetishization by outsiders is really bizarre because that’s not the L.A. that most of us grew up in,” says Khakpour. “That’s not the L.A. that most of us relate to at all, but it’s this surface, weird Hollywood L.A. that a lot of people love.”

And as the Milani sisters, who are in their teens and very young adulthood, live with few restrictions on either their spending or behavior, there are echoes of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel “Less Than Zero,” 

“Definitely the atmosphere of ‘Less Than Zero,’ which is dystopian and these rich kids kind of throwing their lives away in L.A.,” Khakpour acknowledges with a laugh. “I love that about the book. I actually think that ‘Less Than Zero’ is probably one of the best books about L.A. that there is.”

Ellis, it turns out, was a significant source of inspiration for Khakpour while writing “Tehrangeles.” 

“I had to repurchase ‘Glamarama’ when I was working on it because I really loved the way that every sentence in ‘Glamarama’ is packed with inner references,” she says. “I wanted to make sure that it made sense and I remember that he did it really well.”

She also notes that, within “Tehrangeles,” the essays the characters write as content for their reality show are a nod to Ellis, particularly Patrick Bateman’s asides on subjects like the band Genesis in “American Psycho.” 

“I love ‘American Psycho.’ I really do love a lot of what Bret Easton Ellis writes and I love those sections and how they bring this local color to life. They have such an exciting way of parroting the setting in a way,” says Khakpour. “There’s a lot of texture in ‘American Psycho’ that people don’t think about. It almost, to me, feels like a ‘Moby Dick,’ where people have to read it to know about how great it is.”

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​ Orange County Register 

The ‘Portal House’: How USC’s Eric Musselman pulled in a wave of transfers

• June 13, 2024

LOS ANGELES — None of them dared to sleep until Eric Musselman’s eyes grew weary, tethered to their phones until he’d give the unofficial OK to clock out for the night.

Finally, the unbridled motor churning inside Musselman’s 5-foot-7 frame would stall, and he’d trudge upstairs toward a master bedroom and a few hours of rest. Then, and only then, would a handful of his USC assistants-turned-roommates – son Michael Musselman, Anthony Ruta, Will Conroy – scatter to individual corners of their shared spring home in Manhattan Beach, ringing their wives and families for a few fleeting moments before crashing.

They had a barren men’s basketball roster to fill at USC with Musselman’s arrival in April, and precious little time to build it, each day the same relentless grind of another recruit hitting the portal and another flurry of texts and FaceTimes.

Waiting, each night, for Musselman to announce he was going to bed so everyone else could, too.

“You just felt like, if Michael Musselman was over there on the phone with a recruit, and Anthony Ruta was talking to a recruit,” Conroy said, “it’s like, ‘I can’t be on FaceTime with my wife. I gotta be FaceTiming with a kid.’”

This is how the Muss Era of USC basketball was built, with 30 days in a rental home 50 yards from The Strand, a working-man’s Animal House for a group of coaches trying to piece together a team from scratch that could compete in the Big Ten Conference. With families still working on moving to Southern California, they’d obtained the lease not long after Musselman was hired at USC, the former Arkansas head coach collecting most of his staff under one roof to centralize a recruiting frenzy.

Musselman would hand-dry his USC T-shirts on the front porch. Michael Musselman and Ruta slept in a bunk bed. They’d all stroll down The Strand for dinner together every night, hitting one pizza joint so often Conroy joked to the owner he should put an Eric Musselman special on his menu.

Within a month, they’d filled the roster.

“It wasn’t a frat house,” Musselman grinned Thursday morning. “It was a Portal House.”

In the mornings this spring, as Conroy attested, Musselman would get up around 5 a.m. for a seven-mile walk. He and staff would head to the Galen Center around 7 a.m., leave around 4 p.m. grab dinner, and then settle in back in Manhattan Beach to recruit for roughly five hours straight.

Nobody, Conroy remembered, would put their phone down.

“It’d be like midnight,” Musselman remembered Thursday, “and I’d say, ‘Hey, what about that guy from so-and-so college?’”

Longtime head coach Andy Enfield’s departure sent virtually USC’s entire roster scurrying, and Musselman entered Southern California in early April playing from behind, with just Harrison Hornery and walk-on JD Plough returning and the portal already having been open for weeks. And the hardest part of the process, Musselman reflected Thursday, was securing the initial wave.

USC has brought in 11 transfers this offseason, as active as any program in collegiate basketball, by simple necessity. The coaches reached out to countless more. Some of their first targets who they’d brought in on visits, Musselman said, didn’t commit.

“A lot of it was, ‘Well, we didn’t know who we were going to play with,’” Musselman said.

The sanctuary in Manhattan Beach, more than just a home base, became a recruiting tool. Musselman would encourage staffers to take FaceTimes with recruits out on The Strand, strategically placing miles of beach in the background behind them. Quickly, the floodgates opened, a wave of carefully targeted veterans wooed by Musselman’s fire and the promise of USC’s brand.

They snagged 6-foot-7 forward Terrance Williams after four years at Michigan. They plucked graduate transfers Matt Knowling and Clark Slajchert out of the Ivy League. Proven mid-major studs like Boise State’s Chibuzo Agbo Jr., Bowling Green’s Rashaun Agee and Northern Colorado’s Saint Thomas hopped aboard.

On one day this spring, Conroy remembered, the staff was sitting on their porch in Manhattan Beach when Musselman’s phone rang. It was Xavier transfer Desmond Claude, whom USC was pursuing hard in dire need of a point guard.

“Coach, I’m coming,” Claude told Musselman, Conroy remembered.

Musselman roared.

“People, like, was in their houses looking at, where’s this noise coming from?” Conroy said.

Suddenly, the program is littered with 6-foot-6 and 6-foot-7 gamers who can shoot and run the floor, Thursday an early glimpse of the ecosystem similar to those Musselman became known for at Arkansas and Nevada. They moved in constant motion at USC’s fourth summer workout Thursday morning, media getting their first glimpse at this grand experiment, the cavernous upstairs practice court at the Galen Center echoing with grunts and cries and veteran barking.

Musselman didn’t remove his foot from the gas, only pausing to chastise the act of jogging.

“I don’t want to do what I did last year,” Musselman said Thursday, after coming off a 16-17 season at Arkansas, “but I want to do what we did in other years, which is create a team that cosmetically, people are like, ‘I want to go watch that team play.’ And then, a team that opposing teams respect for how hard they play.”

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The monthlong lease has expired on their Manhattan Beach bunker, and Musselman has settled into his new home, his family finally getting situated in Southern California. It’s well time.

None of the coaches cooked, so every meal was eaten out. Sleep was minimal. Ruta went so stir-crazy he moved out after a couple weeks, replaced by Conroy. And yet, the nostalgia of a basketball hive-mind lingers fondly, the beginning of a fresh start for USC.

“He moved into his new place,” Conroy said, “he kept texting us.”

“Like, ‘I miss the Portal House!’”

​ Orange County Register 

NBA Finals: Celtics look to complete sweep of Mavericks for 18th title

• June 13, 2024

By TIM REYNOLDS AP Basketball Writer

DALLAS — It’s over. That’s what the numbers say. There will be a record-setting 18th championship for the Boston Celtics to celebrate soon, maybe very soon. They have a 3-0 lead in the NBA Finals, a lead that has never been wasted in any NBA series, ever.

The stats are absolute.

The Celtics, to their credit, are taking nothing for granted.

On perhaps the next-to-last day of the NBA’s 78th season, the Celtics – who could finish off the Dallas Mavericks in Game 4 on Friday night – were desperately trying to keep things as close to business as usual as could be expected, given that the team’s first title in 16 years is now just one win away.

“At the end of the day we’re the most vulnerable in this,” said Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla, who, at 35, could be the youngest coach to win a title since Bill Russell won one as a player-coach for Boston in 1969. “So, we have to remain with a sense of urgency. We have to have an understanding of our environment. We have to know that we’re just as vulnerable as anybody else in this situation, and how we handle that will determine our fate.”

His point: Don’t let up. A team that has gone 79-20 in its first 99 games of the season – on pace for the second-best single-season record in Celtics history – would likely be wise to keep doing what’s worked all year, one more time.

“Either you survive or you don’t,” said Celtics forward Jaylen Brown, repeating something Mazzulla told the team earlier Thursday. “That resonates with me.”

It might seem puzzling that it’s the Celtics – the team with the 3-0 lead – talking about survival and vulnerability. The reality is, obviously, that it’s the Mavericks who are backed into the corner that no NBA team has ever successfully escaped from.

They’re 0-5 against Boston this season. They’ve been outscored nearly 2-to-1 from 3-point range in this series. They saw a 13-point lead turn into a 21-point deficit on their home court in Game 3. It’s hard to find the proverbial silver lining right now, though the Mavs insisted they still have hope.

“We’re not in the offseason yet,” Mavericks star Luka Doncic said. “They’ve still got to win one more game. Like I said, we’re going to believe until the end.”

There were no concession speeches from the Dallas side on Thursday, no outward signs of surrender whatsoever. But there was an understanding of how tall this mountain is to climb, and how nobody in the NBA has managed to scale it.

Boston came close last year, rallying from a three-game deficit to force a Game 7 at home against Miami in the Eastern Conference finals, only to lose. And that came after the Celtics lost the 2022 NBA Finals to Golden State, that series ending in Boston as well. Those were learning experiences. These Finals will be one as well for the Mavs.

“When you look at the Celtics, they lose to the Warriors two years ago. They lose to Miami in Game 7 (last season). So, it’s just experience of understanding that you’re not promised to get back, that you’ve got to work,” Mavericks coach Jason Kidd said. “You see the group that is out there today. They know how to play. They’re a really good team.”

By Friday night, they could be a championship team.

The only way for the Celtics to lose this series, obviously, is if they lose the next four games. Never mind the stat about how teams with 3-0 series leads in a best-of-seven series are unbeatable – 156 teams have gone up 3-0, 156 teams have eventually prevailed in that series. Consider this one instead – the last time the Celtics lost four consecutive games in the same season was in May 2021, two coaching changes and a whole slew of roster turnover ago.

“I think from our experiences over the past couple of years, the thing that we’ve really gotten a lot better at is not relaxing, not being complacent. From game to game or series to series, we always want more,” Celtics forward Jayson Tatum said. “Maybe in recent years we took things for granted at some points or were happy to make it to certain rounds, where (now) we’re not satisfied. Even now up 3-0, nobody is celebrating or anything. We still feel like there’s a lot more that we can do. There’s a lot more that we want to do.”

There’s really only one thing left for this Celtics team to do. One more win and Banner 18 – one that would break the tie with the Lakers for the most championships in NBA history – will finally be secured.

Mazzulla doesn’t care when it happens, just that it happens.

“There’s four rounds left in this fight,” he said. “And however long it takes, whatever it takes, we’ll see how it goes.”

DONCIC KNOWS HE’S LEARNING

Doncic winced ever so slightly as he stepped onto the stage to address reporters a day after his Mavericks fell behind 3-0.

A rough first Finals for the 25-year-old superstar, no doubt – an injury-filled postseason punctuated by fouling out for the first time in his playoff career, thanks to a four-foul fourth quarter in a 106-99 loss to the Celtics in Game 3.

Near the end of six seasons filled with comparisons to LeBron James, here’s another for Doncic. Just like the player he idolized as a teenager, Doncic is on the verge of having to weather failure on basketball’s biggest stage before getting more chances to experience the ultimate success.

“I didn’t really study the first Finals of some people,” Doncic said Thursday.

Doncic did remember the first Eastern Conference finals – two, actually – for Michael Jordan in Chicago a generation ago.

“Obviously, there’s the story of MJ against Detroit,” the five-time All-Star said. “That was a big thing. I think he just learned from it. You’ve got to go through lows first to go on top. I think that’s great experience.”

After finally breaking through against the Pistons, Jordan won the title in his first trip to the NBA Finals in 1991, the start of a 6-0 run in the title series over an eight-season span.

Doncic is at risk of the same fate in his first Finals as James, who was swept with Cleveland against San Antonio in 2007. James lost again with Miami – against Dallas, no less – in 2011 before winning back-to-back titles with the Heat.

Asked if he thought his game could improve in the offseason, Doncic said, “Oh, definitely, a lot of holes,” before reiterating he would learn plenty from his first Finals.

The end is near for Dallas because Doncic didn’t get enough help from co-star Kyrie Irving in the first two games, or from his supporting cast in any of the first three.

Still, the Slovenian sensation has had his own difficulties, particularly in Game 3. The Celtics relentlessly targeted Doncic’s defense, which has been solid to good overall in these playoffs.

The four fouls came so quickly in the fourth quarter, his sixth forced a challenge that Dallas lost with 4:12 remaining. The Mavs were on a 20-2 run when Doncic was disqualified, and scored again to get within a point before Boston held on to avoid blowing a 21-point lead with 11 minutes remaining.

With a long history of complaining to officials, Doncic made a point earlier in the playoffs to go back to having fun. He’s had trouble sustaining it, and didn’t have kind words for the refs after fouling out in regulation for the first time in his career.

“I just really want to win,” Doncic said. “Sometimes I don’t show it the right way, but at the end of the day, I really want to win. I’ve got to do a better job showing it a different way.”

Doncic is 3 for 3 on miserable fourth quarters in the Finals, with more turnovers (four) than baskets (three) and zero 3-pointers. Before the rare foul-out (the third of Doncic’s career), he sat most of the fourth with the Celtics comfortably in front in Game 1.

Dallas’ best closer hasn’t been closing in this series, and added a chest contusion to a postseason litany of ailments that included a sprained right knee and a sore left ankle.

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Although the chest injury – sustained in Game 1 – was the only one on the latest injury report, it’s significant enough that Doncic confirmed to ESPN the network’s report that he had been taking a pain-killing injection by acknowledging he would probably have another one before Game 4.

“My message to him is he’s not alone in this,” said Irving, who bounced back from a sluggish offensive start to the series with 35 points in Game 3. “He’s played as best as he can despite the circumstances, just injuries and stuff. He’s been giving it his all. It’s not all on him.”

The spotlight in still on him, just as it was for Jordan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and James before the first of his four titles nearly 20 years ago.

“I think the history is there for us to learn from, when you look at great players and the struggles,” Kidd said. “But the great ones, they use that going into the next season or the next couple seasons to try to get back there because now they understand experience is a big thing.”

Doncic won’t do that until this season is officially over.

AP sports writer Schuyler Dixon contributed to this story.

​ Orange County Register