Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Sorted by date Results 96 - 120 of 457
August 2, 2022 - The Novavax vaccine to prevent serious disease in Covid-19 will begin to be administered at county Public Health vaccination sites beginning tomorrow, Wednesday, August 3. The Novavax injection uses older, protein-based technology rather than the novel mRNA technology utilized by the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. According to Dr. Glenn Wortmann, infectious disease specialist at MedStar Health, as reported by CNET, Novavax is similar to the Hepatitis B...
September 1, 2022 - Today, Barbara Ferrer, Director of Public Health, announced that doses of the new booster shot targeting Omicron will be arriving in the county between September 6 and 9. The Federal Drug Agency has given Emergency Use Authorization of the new vaccine that can be given to anyone over age 12 who has not had a Covid vaccine within the past two months. The bivalent boosters are not to be used as a primary series, but only as a booster following at least one...
August 22, 2022 - A man talking on his cell phone on the sidewalk near 2nd Street and Washington Avenue in Santa Monica after midnight on Sunday morning was approached by three men who held a gun to his head, beat him, and stole his wallet and phone. They drove off in a car that pulled up to help them flee. The entire incident was witnessed by a resident who provided security camera footage of the crime. Police arrived and about 30 minutes later caught the criminals who were...
August 22, 2022 - The Los Angeles County Public Health Department claims that 31,291 residents have died of Covid-19 as of August 22 since the pandemic began in March, 2020. But have that many people actually died from the effects of becoming infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus? Given the loose definition health officials use for a Covid death, it is not at all clear. "We don't categorize deaths as 'because of' Covid vs. 'with Covid,' health officals wrote us. "All Covid...
August 24, 2022 - At the Santa Monica City Council meeting last night Santa Monica Police Chief Ramon Batista vigorously disputed what he called the "falsehood" that there are no police officers working at night. SMPD works "around the clock," he said and then displayed a slide showing the first names of 48 officers who he said "work at night." Another slide showed 34 officers had overtime assignments that "work most often at night, and a third slide showed 30 other officers,...
August 24, 2022 - Santa Monica Police Chief Ramon Batista gave a rosy picture of strides forward made by the department in cutting crime over the past few months at a City Council meeting last night. Along with adding additional officers to the downtown area, SMPD conducted five "Public Health and Safety Operations" that had been conducted with various subdepartments in the police force over the past month. Over the span of 8 weekends, in which these operations were conducted...
August 17, 2022 - Having failed in their attempt to make Ethnic Studies a high school requirement for admission to a University of California campus, proponents of "critical" ethnic studies are turning their attention toward training K-12 teachers in their politically trendy version of the nation's history. This version, in which people are divided into oppressor versus oppressed classes, has been accused by the AMCHA Initiative as "inherently anti-Jewish" and "can't help but...
August 12, 2022 - NMS, one of the largest developers of property in Santa Monica, won a bid to depose Santa Monica Mayor Sue Himmelrich's husband, Michael Soloff, in a court decision July 26 regarding NMS's lawsuit against a rent-control law passed by the city in August of 2020. The City's Motion to Stay Discovery was denied on July 26 by U.S. District Judge Fernando L. Aenlle-Rocha. Soloff is co-chair of Santa Monicans for Renter's Rights, the progressive political party who...
August 5, 2022 - At her media briefing yesterday, LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer, PhD, MPH, MEd, declined to answer a question from a Los Angeles Times reporter regarding to what extent it is safer to be around a person who is vaccinated. Ferrer does not typically miss answering a question from the press, even if multiple questions come from one reporter. Data from the Health Department's website on "Outcomes by Vaccination Status," clearly show that transmiss...
August 2, 2022 - City officials were warned of dangerous conditions on the grounds of the central Santa Monica Public Library well in advance of the fatal stabbing Friday evening in the north courtyard of the building. Santa Monica property and business owner John Alle has been recording the takeover of the city's downtown by vagrancy and crime since the start of the Covid-19-related lockdown in 2020. On July 8, 2022, roughly three weeks before the library stabbing, he...
July 28, 2022 - There will be no reinstitution of an indoor mask mandate in public spaces, Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer announced today in a media briefing. She had announced two weeks ago that if the number of Covid-related hospitalizations remained above a certain level for two weeks in a row, she would issue a Health Order requiring masks be worn in all public indoor spaces. But she said that a recent decline in hospital admissions was bringing the county out of...
July 14, 2022 - Dr. Barbara Ferrer, Director of Public Health for Los Angeles County, says they will impose a universal indoor mask mandate for public spaces starting July 29. She thinks it highly unlikely the county will reverse course and the number of Covid-19-positive hospital patients will decrease given a steady increase in the number of infections. Today, the county moved into a "high" level of transmission per guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control, with more...
July 8, 2022 - Los Angeles County has been living under the threat of a new indoor mask mandate for weeks now as Covid-19 cases, driven by various Omicron subvariants, bring more Covid patients to area hospitals. Once there are over 10 Covid patients per 100,000 residents in the hospital, the county is deemed by Centers for Disease Control guidance to be in a High transmission level. A patient is a Covid patient if they test positive for Covid, whether they suffer from the...
June 23, 2022 - Both the Centers for Disease Control and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health are revealing that individuals who are up to date with their Covid-19 booster shots are becoming infected with the virus at nearly twice the rate as the merely vaccinated. The unexpected reversal of the vaccine's effect is more pronounced in some age groups than others, according to data from the LADPH. On June 19, CBS news showed a case rate chart from the CDC that...
June 30, 2022 - On Tuesday night, the City Council narrowly voted to appoint three business property owners to the Downtown Santa Monica, Inc board instead of the previous council-connected outsiders. DTSM is a "private" non-profit organization that is supposed to work with the City government to manage services and operations in downtown Santa Monica. The 13-member board of DTSM is made up of 6 members appointed by the City Council, 6 members elected by the dues-paying...
June 24, 2022 - The City of Santa Monica abruptly halted continuing its planned demolition of Parking Structure 3 downtown amid allegations it was not sufficiently protecting the public against exposure to asbestos and other contaminants. Residents and business and property owners have been noticing large amounts of dust in the air from the city's demolition of its own parking structure. According to local property owner John Alle, air dust samples taken by his environmental...
A tip developed by a Community Violence Reduction Division investigator led to the seizure of 14,000 pounds of illegal fireworks in Azusa ahead of the 4th of July weekend. In a press release, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon said, "By embedding our prosecutors and investigators in the communities that we serve, we were able to secure valuable information that led to the safe removal of thousands of pounds of illegal fireworks." The district attorney's office...
June 24, 2022 - The death rates from Covid-19 for the past month have been so low for those under 50 years old that the Los Angeles County Health Department is unable to show them on a bar chart. Even the unvaccinated are not expiring from Covid at a rate that can be shown on the chart at the health department's Covid central. "Rates for some age categories are not shown due to small numbers," is the explanation given on the chart that only shows death rates for those over 50...
June 23, 2022 - At a media briefing this afternoon, Dr. Paul Simon, the County Health Department's Chief Science Officer, pushed back the prediction for when transmission will reach the point of triggering new indoor mask mandates. Last week, the county had predicted that the 7-day cumulative hospitalization admission rate would exceed 10 per 100,000 people around June 30. Should hospital admission rate remain higher than that for two consecutive weeks, the health department...
June 15, 2022 - Pools of urine, tagged walls, drug addicts, and homeless squatters greeted downtown Santa Monica property owner John Alle as he arrived early to work the morning following the City Council meeting that approved extending the contract with Allied Universal Security. The security company is charged with patrolling the seven public garages and associated alleyways overnight until 6 am in the morning. The Block by Block Ambassadors take over patrol duty at 6 am,...
June 16, 2022 - Yesterday evening, a specialty store located in the 1300 block of the Third Street Promenade was robbed of nearly $20,000 in gold by a group invading the store. The robbery occurred at approximately 7:30 pm when it was still light outside. Property owner John Alle was right outside the store when he saw the robbery. The store owner is a friend of his. Alle says he saw a Safety Ambassador walk directly away from the situation when he realized something was...
June 14, 2022 - An editorial in the Santa Monica Mirror by Santa Monica College Board of Trustee Vice-Chair and Downtown Santa Monica, Inc. Chair Barry Snell advocating the continuation of the Downtown Ambassador program was met with a scathing retort from property and business owner John Alle. Snell claimed that DTSM, the quasi-governmental body charged with upkeep and promotion of the Third Street and Promenade, was "fully aware of concerns regarding public safety" in the...
June 14, 2022 - In a passionate letter to the Santa Monica City Council, former Mayor and Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights co-founder Denny Zane blasted Councilmember Phil Brock's proposed tax on the transfer of property, saying it was "poison pill" designed to undermine a competing - and much higher tax - proposed by Mayor Sue Himmelrich. His letter was rebutted by Santa Monica Audit Subcommittee member Marc Verville, an expert in corporate finance, who called Zane's...
June 10, 2022 - For at least one school year, if not more, the entire campus of Muir Elementary/Smash on 4th Street in Santa Monica will be evacuated. The decision to relocate students and staff came after a May 24 report by Alta Environmental NV5 that found two rooms with unacceptable levels of mold and eleven rooms with water damage that could mean mold growth. One room had visible mold growing behind the dry erase board. The high spore level in the other room was deemed...
June 10, 2022 - Results from the primary election that was held on June 7 are still preliminary as vote-by-mail ballots still have several days to reach their destination. But results are available from the 580,358 vote-by-mail ballots already received and the 242,187 votes cast at vote centers. The following data from the California Secretary of State and the Los Angeles County Registrar/Recorder are as of June 9 and June 8 respectively. For almost all offices, candidates...
