Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
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A concerned reader from Coconut Creek, Florida, has brought to the Santa Monica Observer's attention what he describes as a growing wave of deceptive AI-generated Instagram profiles featuring attractive women portrayed as law enforcement officers, military personnel, border agents, and other authority figures-profiles that amass hundreds of thousands of followers while potentially setting the stage for romance scams or other fraud. In a submitted news tip, Neal Williams...
Truckee, California — Rescue teams have successfully extracted six surviving backcountry skiers from the site of a major avalanche in the Castle Peak area northwest of Lake Tahoe, but nine others from the same guided group remain missing as of Wednesday morning, February 18, 2026. The Nevada County Sheriff's Office confirmed that the incident involved a party of 15 people—four professional guides from Blackbird Mountain Guides and 11 clients—on the final day of a three...
February 18, 2026: Flash floods have swept through parts of Los Angeles as a powerful series of atmospheric river storms continues to batter large areas of California, causing widespread flooding, road closures, and debris flows. The high-impact weather system, which began delivering heavy rain on Monday, February 16, 2026, has triggered urban flooding across the Los Angeles Basin, with water levels rising significantly in streets and neighborhoods. Reports indicate that...
San Francisco, February 11, 2026 - In a move that has sent ripples through the artificial intelligence community, Mrinank Sharma, the head of Anthropic's Safeguards Research Team, announced his resignation on February 9, 2026, citing profound concerns about the state of the world and the challenges of aligning powerful technology with core human values. Sharma, who joined Anthropic in 2023 shortly after completing his PhD in Statistical Machine Learning at the University of Ox...
Minneapolis, February 17, 2026 – A state employee tasked with helping detect fraud in Minnesota's Medicaid program avoided criminal prosecution last year after allegedly vandalizing multiple Tesla vehicles, highlighting a striking irony that has resurfaced in recent online discussions. Dylan Bryan Adams, 33 at the time, was arrested in April 2025 by Minneapolis police following incidents in March and early April where at least six Tesla cars were keyed, causing an estimated $...
The article has been further updated as of February 13-14, 2026, incorporating the latest from independent meteorologist Jason Farhang (via his recent posts and videos) and official sources like the National Weather Service (NWS) Los Angeles/Oxnard, LA County alerts, and local media reports (e.g., KTLA, FOXLA, NBC Los Angeles, LA Times). Farhang's February 13 update shows no major change, with rainfall still trending steady at 2.2-6.2 inches (slightly adjusted downward from...
London, 11 February 2026 – With just three months until voters head to the polls in crucial local, Scottish, and Welsh elections on 7 May, immigration policy has emerged as the single most pressing issue for much of the British public, overshadowing even the economy in many surveys and posing a major headache for Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour government. Recent polling paints a stark picture of widespread unease. A Gallup survey released this week shows the United K...
2/12/26 — The Northeast Neighbors, a grassroots neighborhood organization representing residents in Santa Monica's northeast area, has voted to forgo the City's annual Neighborhood Organization Grant for 2026. In a letter dated September 9, 2025, to the City Council and City Manager, the group's board, chaired by Tricia Crane, cited the new grant requirements as overly restrictive and incompatible with its mission to serve as an independent voice for the community. The o...
SANTA MONICA, CA - Local pet owners will soon need to find a new spot for their furry friends' supplies, as Unleashed by Petco, located near the intersection of 15th Street and Wilshire Boulevard, is set to close its doors on March 2, 2026. According to a sign posted in the store's door, the location at 1402 Wilshire Blvd. is wrapping up operations at the beginning of March. The notice directs customers to the nearby full-service Petco store at 2910 Wilshire Blvd. for...
Santa Monica, CA – February 10, 2026 – Social media posts from local residents and observers indicate a possible power outage affecting parts of Santa Monica, particularly in the 90403 ZIP code area near Montana Avenue, at about 11:30 am on February 10th. Power was restored at 12:19 am on February 11th. Additional user reports on X described witnessing a transformer blow near Montana Avenue and 10th Street as storm conditions intensified, which could have triggered iso...
Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) delivered a controversial and highly celebrated halftime performance at Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026, at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California. This marked the first time a Latin artist headlined the Super Bowl halftime show solo, and it was performed entirely in Spanish, making it a groundbreaking celebration of Puerto Rican and broader Latin culture.The roughly 13-minute set was described as an exuberant, high-energy...
February 9, 2026--As the echoes of Super Bowl LX fade from Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California-where the New England Patriots faced off against the Seattle Seahawks in a highly anticipated rematch-the question lingers for fans still reeling from the price tags: Were those eye-popping resale figures really what it cost to attend the big game? Viral clips and social media posts circulated widely in the lead-up to Sunday's championship, with attendees boasting (or...
Santa Monica, CA - February 9, 2026 - A group of local residents and neighborhood organizations has formally questioned the validity of a December 17, 2025, Santa Monica City Council vote approving development agreements for an affordable housing project with the Hollywood Community Housing Corporation (HCHC). The vote, listed as Agenda Item 11.A, approved a 99-year ground lease on city-owned land at 14th Street and committed $13.5 million from the city's Housing Trust Fund...
A tragic accident occurred on Thursday, February 5, 2026, when a 92-year-old woman lost control of her vehicle and crashed into the 99 Ranch Market in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, killing three people and injuring six others. The incident took place shortly after noon near the intersection of Westwood Boulevard and Rochester Avenue. Authorities reported that the driver, operating a silver Mercedes sedan (though some early reports mentioned a different make),...
Los Angeles City Councilwoman Traci Park announced today that a long-standing nuisance involving an illegally parked recreational vehicle (RV) on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice has finally been resolved. In an Instagram post shared earlier today, Councilwoman Park, who represents Council District 11 including Venice, highlighted the RV that had been blocking traffic for months. Accompanying photos showed the vehicle in question and presumably its removal. Park wrote. "In...
Fairfield, California — February 5, 2026 — Anheuser-Busch, the nation's largest beer producer, is set to permanently close its longstanding brewery in Fairfield later this month, marking the end of nearly 50 years of operations at the site and affecting approximately 238 local employees. The facility at 3101 Busch Drive, which opened in 1976, will cease production between February 9 and February 22, 2026, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) fili...
- 18% of THE WHOLE COUNTRY'S home health care billing is coming out of Los Angeles County - One doctor billed the government $120 million in a single year claiming to oversee 1,900 patients Los Angeles County has drawn significant attention from federal officials due to concerns over potential fraud in the Medicare hospice and home health care sectors. Recent reports indicate that the county accounts for approximately 18% of the nation's total Medicare billing for these...
Santa Monica Airport reverts to the City on January 1, 2028 after 120 years as an airport. A few residents want to turn it into high density housing or a park or both. Others want to keep it an airport. A new poll reveals that they are in the majority. A newly released independent poll indicates that a solid majority of Santa Monica voters want to keep the Santa Monica Airport (KSMO) operating in some form, directly challenging years of city planning that has leaned toward...
The City of Santa Monica has filed a lawsuit seeking approximately $18 million in restitution and penalties against a landlord and his family, accusing them of illegally converting dozens of rent-controlled apartments into short-term rentals listed on Airbnb and VRBO. This action continues the city's enforcement efforts against illegal short-term rentals to protect its rent-controlled housing stock, explained the City Attorney in a press release. In a complaint filed on...
A Waymo robotaxi hit a child near Grant Elementary School on January 23 during morning drop-off hours. The low-speed incident (vehicle slowed from 17 mph to 6 mph) caused minor injuries after the child entered the roadway from behind a double-parked SUV. Federal regulators (NHTSA) opened an investigation, highlighting ongoing concerns about self-driving cars in school zones. A Waymo autonomous vehicle struck a child near Grant Elementary School in Santa Monica on January 23,...
San Francisco, CA – In a quintessential Bay Area moment blending urban life with wild surprises, a young mountain lion was safely tranquilized and captured in the upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood on Tuesday, January 27, 2026, after days of sightings that captivated-and concerned-residents. But the story took an even more ironic twist when a coyote casually strolled into the frame during a live television report on the big cat's removal. The 2-year-old, 77-pound male m...
Minneapolis, MN – January 28, 2026 - Newly surfaced video footage has revealed an earlier confrontation involving Alex Jeffrey Pretti, the 37-year-old intensive care nurse fatally shot by federal agents during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026. The video, which appears to have been recorded on January 13, 2026-11 days before Pretti's death-shows a man identified by multiple sources as Pretti engaging in aggressive behavior toward U.S. I...
The U.S. Department of Justice has intervened in a federal lawsuit accusing the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) of using race as a factor in its admissions process, in violation of federal civil rights laws and California's long-standing ban on affirmative action.In a statement released on January 28, 2026, the Justice Department announced it was joining the existing class-action suit originally filed in May 2025 by Students...
San Jose, CA – A five-day rampage of armed robberies, carjackings, and high-speed pursuits came to a violent end on January 21, 2026, when 30-year-old Muhammed Hussein of Davis opened fire on San Jose police officers, seriously wounding a sergeant before being struck by a patrol vehicle and killed in a downtown shootout. According to San Jose Police Department officials, Hussein – identified following the incident – began his crime spree on January 17 in Sacramento, where...
LOS ANGELES — It took ten years just to approve the plan for a long awaited train from Van Nuys to Westwood, along the 405 Freeway. It'll add half a cent to LA's sales tax, and there still isn't nearly $25 billion to fund it. They tell us it will take eight years to build it, but it will really take say, 25. But finally the MTA said yes. On January 22, 2026, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) Board of Directors unanimously approved the L...
