OB Rag

A group of OB leaders attended the City Council hearing on the mayor’s budget on Monday and gave the politicos an earful of what Ocean Beach has in infrastructural needs. On top of their agenda was the lifeguard station and the OB Library.

They included Gio Ingolia and Gretchen Newsom from the OB Town Council, Valerie Paz and John Ambert from the OB Planning Board, Judy Collier from the Friends of the OB Library, and a representative of the Sunset Cliffs Nature Park committee.

This group of OBceans joined dozens of other San Diegans who were requesting the Council to increase funding for parks and recreation around the city, as well for increased monies for public safety and the arts – all in the proposed budget of Mayor Kevin Faulconer. His budget includes $3.2 billion.

Nuclear Shutdown News chronicles the continuing decline of the US nuclear power industry, and highlights the efforts of those who are creating a better energy future.

Here’s the April edition:

By Michael Steinberg /Black Rain Press

Oyster Creek – oldest US nuke keeps shutting itself down

On April 28 patch.com ran “NRC Oyster Creek Nuclear Has Substantial Safety Problems.” Located in New Jersey, the Oyster Creek nuclear plant is the nation’s oldest (sometimes) operating nuke. It started up in late 1969, and is now 45 years old. US nuclear plants were designed to last only 40 years.

Just had to see snow last Saturday. It was early May and the drought was going strong.

Had heard that there had been snow falling in our local mountains on Friday, May 8th, so turned the vehicle east and headed out 8.

By Jim Miller

Last week I turned fifty, and someone asked me what was the most important thing I had learned in half a century of life. I sighed. Never having been one to make too much of personal landmarks, my response was that this was just another day.

And now that that day and that question are already past, what matters most is the unspeakable beauty of this second as my fingers touch the keyboard, and I breath in and out and listen to the sound of my son singing in the background, my wife talking to the cat, and the birds chirping in the branches of the tree outside my window.

San Diego’s NBC affiliate continues to pave the way for local media in their coverage of the fatal police shooting of a man in the Midway area.Their coverage of the details and developing scandal around this shooting is the only news source tracking down witnesses and covering a small demonstration against the shooting held Saturday, May 9th.

7San Diego interviewed a second man who said he’s seen the surveillance video of the shooting and called it “unprovoked.”

This large tree was cut down or chopped up after it fell. It was living in Collier Park for decades until this past weekend.

If we find out any more information about what happened, we’ll let you know.

By Jenifer McKim /New England Journal of Invest. Reporting/May,9 2015

Artificial turf fields, cushioned with recycled crushed tires and increasingly in demand for US athletic complexes, are getting some serious pushback.

In Swampscott last week, town meeting members approved plans to install a new synthetic field with silica sand, a more expensive product touted as a nontoxic alternative to the small rubber pellets known as crumb rubber ubiquitous on thousands of synthetic fields across Massachusetts and the nation.

San Diego’s local NBC affiliate, 7SanDiego, has a videotaped interview with a man who saw surveillance footage of the recent fatal police shooting in the Midway area and quotes him as saying,

“This guy shouldn’t have been shot based on what I saw on the video.”

“This was wrong,” the unidentified man said, who works across the alley where the shooting occurred on last Thursday, April 30. He said in the newsvideo:

This guy shouldn’t have been shot based on what I saw on the video. The guy was walking, just normal, lazical lazy walking. If he (the officer) said ‘stop’, that’s all he said. He just opened the door, and said ‘stop’ and shot.”

By Lois Lane

A Report of the Sunset Cliffs Advisory Council Meeting – Monday, May 4, 2015

In 2007 a kick-off meeting was held at the OB Rec Center to plan the future of Sunset Cliffs Natural Park. Dudek & Associates took public input for the Sunset Cliffs Park Drainage Study they were initiating.

Now, eight years later, something is about happen. Not drainage and erosion, but making the park look like a park, with an ADA-compatible walkway, signage, and more native plants.

Celebrations are breaking out in some quarters of San Diego today as it was announced that the LA Times is buying the U-T San Diego.

Here is the LA Times account:

The parent company of the Los Angeles Times has agreed to buy the U-T San Diego, uniting the newspapers of California’s two largest cities under common ownership. Tribune Publishing — owner of The Times, the Chicago Tribune and other daily newspapers — announced Thursday that it will pay $85 million in a cash-and-stock deal for the U-T, eight community weeklies and related websites.

Despite long and continued opposition by native peoples in California, the Vatican is making it official that Junipero Serra will be declared a saint.

Serra of course is the friar that began California’s string of missions, beginning with the one in San Diego.

The process to canonize Serra has taken decades but the current Pope Francis has personally given his weight to the effort, which some call “steamrolling” or “fast-tracking” the process, and now it all seems certain.

There are now two very curious things about last week’s fatal shooting by a San Diego police officer of a knife-wielding man in the Midway area.

First, the police officer’s body camera was not on – or at least was not recording.

And second, there was no knife – as first reported – but some kind of “shiny-looking object” in the suspect’s hand, as the U-T San Diego reported today, 5/7/15.

This much we do know: a man named Fridoon Zalbeg Rawshannehad, 31 years of age, was shot to death by San Diego police officer Neil Browder right after midnight, Thursday April 30th. The shooting occurred behind a Midway District adult store, the Hi-Lite Theatre and Bookstore. Browder is a 27-year veteran of San Diego’s police force and he was wearing one of the newly-purchased body cameras.