Jill Cowan

Today, we’re starting with a dispatch from my colleague Thomas Fuller, who is based in the Bay Area:

Five months ago, we brought you the story of the rancher in Mendocino County who inadvertently started the largest wildfire in California history when he hammered a stake into a wasp’s nest.

I was surprised to learn last week that his home nearly burned — again — in the latest round of wind-driven fires in Northern California. Flames from the Burris fire, which was extinguished Nov. 3, scorched the sloping fields around the rancher’s wood-shingled home, coming very close to engulfing the wraparound porch.

“It took great effort on firefighters’ part to defend that structure this time,” said Tricia Austin, a fire prevention specialist with Cal Fire in Mendocino County. “Without the engine providing protection it very well could have been lost.”

Parts of California burn every year. And sometimes the very next year they burn again.

The Burris fire, which neighbors say ignited at or near a facility that makes compost, burned 703 acres and destroyed some sheds and minor structures but no homes.

Wildfire experts say fires frequently return to areas that have burned recently, underlining how no part of the state can let down its guard. The Kincade fire in Sonoma County, which forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate in October and was extinguished last week, burned through areas ravaged by the 2017 Tubbs fire and the 2015 Valley fire.

Ron Milliken lives across Highway 20 from the rancher, Glenn Kile, who started what became the Mendocino Complex fire in 2018, by far the largest the state’s history.

Milliken evacuated last year. And he evacuated again this year when the Burris fire ignited on the morning of Oct. 27.

It was 4 a.m. when he and his wife smelled smoke, but at least there was enough time to make a pot of coffee before they had to flee.

This article originally appeared in

Flames Return to Where California's Largest Wildfire Started

(California Today)

On Oct. 29, 1969, in a windowless room at the University of California, Los Angeles, a message was sent to the Stanford Research Center from a very large machine.

It was supposed to be “login,” but only the first two letters transmitted. So the message was, simply, “lo.”

“We had no idea — we had nothing ready, because all we wanted to do was to log in,” Leonard Kleinrock, one of the men who sent that message, told me last week. “But we couldn’t have asked for a more succinct, more prophetic, more powerful message than, ‘lo.’”

The message was the first ever sent between two computers. It was transmitted on a network called Arpanet. And from it, the internet was eventually grown. Of course, that’s a vast oversimplification of the momentous technological feat that this was.

On the day that I met Kleinrock in that same windowless room — which has been largely preserved as a kind of minimuseum documenting the birth of the internet — lawmakers in Washington were grilling Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook allowing hate speech and disinformation to flourish on its platform, which reaches billions of people. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, was there to defend his company’s project developing a kind of digital money.

Kleinrock, 85, said he first got interested in electrical engineering when, as a child in New York City, he made himself a crystal radio.

When UCLA offered him a job teaching engineering, he left his position as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to move out west.

Moving around the room and gesturing to decades-old equipment or diagrams hung on the walls, Kleinrock was clearly practiced at explaining packet switching and queuing theory. After more than five decades, he’s a comfortable, genial lecturer, even in one-on-one conversation.

But the story of how that message ended up being sent has been told by people who understand computers better than I do. What I wanted to know was how he now sees the world he helped create.

What, if anything, would he change about the way the internet has evolved? Did he have any regrets?

Kleinrock said his feelings were complicated.

He noted that in a news release issued by UCLA announcing Arpanet’s deployment, he is quoted as accurately predicting that “we will probably see the spread of ‘computer utilities,’ which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices.”

He said he thinks the network will become even more invisible than it is now, which seems likely.

But what he and his researcher colleagues missed, Kleinrock said, was the social side of the network. And he missed the ways in which that capability would, he wrote in an email later, “impact every aspect of our society.”

A few years ago, as hacking and spam and other undesirable uses of the internet proliferated, he said he often told people that the internet was in its disobedient teenage years, that it would grow out of its immature period.

“What’s happened is, it’s now more mature, and what’s going on?” he said. “We have nation-states putting boundaries around their national networks. We have organized crime, pilfering, money laundering, and we have extremists shouting things on a network.”

And if everyone’s talking at an equal level, he said, it’s natural that extreme ideas would command the most audience.

Kleinrock said he blames two things. One, he said he and the internet’s early builders could have headed off if they’d anticipated the need for it: strong user authentication as well as strong file verification.

That wasn’t something researchers built in because at the time, he said, they were trying to encourage wider adoption of the network so they could continue their research — not build barriers.

The second, in retrospect, may have been more inevitable: the commercialization of the internet.

He said that in 1994, the first piece of spam reached the network: A pair of lawyers sent a message offering their services in winning a green card lottery.

“They were advertising their services on our research network — how dare they?” Kleinrock recalled. “So we sent the email back to them and said, ‘Stop, shame on you.’”

But it was too late. Kleinrock likened it to a kind of fall from grace.

“We didn’t see the dark side emerging because of our culture, which was a bunch of good people working together,” he said. “We didn’t imagine we would reach a point where there would be a profit motive. We didn’t take out any patents. We didn’t try to own the IP.

“This was an engineering challenge.”

Still, he said, not everything is bad.

He still marvels at the fact that, at one point, his 99-year-old grandmother and his granddaughter could be on the internet at the same time. And they’d be able to use it to talk to each other.

And he said that, at least in terms of privacy and security, it’s possible to make the internet better.

“The citizenry has to get involved, the government has a role,” Kleinrock said, “and the scientists have a role.”

The Internet at 50: 'We Didn't See the Dark Side Emerging'

On Thursday, officials around California marked the 30th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed 63 people, injured thousands, collapsed a span of freeway and crumbled buildings.

Some, like Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, participated in drills as part of a statewide effort to get kids prepared.

And then, early Friday morning, residents in the Los Angeles area received a real-life reminder of the threat when a magnitude 3.7 earthquake struck Compton, the U.S. Geological Survey said. There was no significant structural damage reported.

Also on Thursday, there was praise for the release of a new earthquake early warning app.

Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state — who as a state senator wrote the 2013 bill starting the process of developing the app — said that the United States had for too long lagged other countries in adopting a system that could save lives. But he was pleased that’s no longer the case.

“When the next big earthquake strikes, every second of advance notice will matter,” he said in a statement.

The Compton quake, however, was not the Big One, and was too small to trigger a warning on the app.

Meanwhile, movement has been detected for the first time on the Garlock fault in Southern California, which experts say is capable of producing an 8.0 quake. But they cautioned it’s impossible to say whether that movement portends a temblor.

Compton Earthquake Rattles the Los Angeles Area

The past couple of weeks haven’t done much to dispel them.

In Northern California, fierce Diablo winds helped create the dangerous conditions that prompted Pacific Gas &amp; Electric to shut off power to hundreds of thousands of customers for days.

Then there are the Santa Ana winds, which helped whip up the deadly fires that tore across the southland over the weekend.

The Santa Anas hold a particular place in Los Angeles lore, not only as fire propellants and harbingers of allergy flare-ups but also as a kind of malevolent psychic force, a regional Mercury in retrograde.

That last part rankles Janin Guzman Morales a bit, though.

“The winds have been here since way before we were,” she said Sunday. “The narrative of them being demonized as aspects of nature — I don’t think that’s a fair approach.”

What Guzman Morales, a scientist at University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography who has researched Santa Ana winds, hopes to encourage instead is perhaps less mysterious: thoughtful evaluation of the way we interact with weather in a changing climate.

She said that the Saddleridge and the Sandalwood fires, which have destroyed homes and have been blamed for three deaths, were fueled by typical Santa Ana winds.

“This is mid-October, so this is pretty much the standard, classic wildfire season in Southern California,” she said.

The winds, she said, usually last for a couple of days before they subside, which gives firefighters a chance to control blazes. On average, she said, there are three Santa Ana wind events this month each year.

But the damage that such fires cause is increasing, as scientists have warned, because more people are moving into homes built near where cities end and wild lands begin. Weather is becoming more extreme in general, so this year’s rainy winter has made for lots of material to burn.

Guzman Morales said her research has shown that climate change could make Santa Ana wind events less frequent in fall and spring, and when coupled with projected decreases in fall precipitation, would push Southern California’s wildfire season deeper into winter.

She said it’s tough to predict whether that could contribute to more severe blazes, although her report suggested that back-to-back Santa Ana wind events in December could result in longer burning and bigger wildfires.

While they arrive and move separately, Northern California’s Diablo winds behave similarly to Santa Ana winds, Guzman Morales said, but have been less studied.

“We want to look at the coordination between those two wind regimes,” she said, “and whether there’s a common larger scale reason.”

Updates:

— As of Sunday afternoon, the Saddleridge Fire was 41% contained, according to CalFire. All evacuation orders had been lifted and schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District were set to run on normal schedules Monday, with some outdoor activities limited.

— Officials have not determined the fire’s cause, but they said they’re investigating an electrical tower as the possible ignition point — just as energy companies tried to take precautions by shutting off power to customers around the state.

— The Sandalwood Fire in Riverside County was 86% contained, CalFire said as of Sunday evening. Residents of the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park were still under evacuation orders. Officials said they hoped to have the fire fully contained Monday.

— Authorities said a garbage truck driver dumped a burning load of trash by the side of the road, sparking the Sandalwood Fire.

— Forecasts bode well for getting both major blazes under control.

— Power was restored to all PG&amp;E; customers affected by the blackouts. And cooler temperatures are expected to be on the way to the Bay Area, reducing the fire risk.

— The planned outages, experts said, were a low-tech solution to a problem afflicting a high-tech state. They said microgrids could be a potential way forward.

How California's 'Demonized' Winds Shape Wildfire Season

Among meteorological phenomena, California’s autumn winds have distinctly bad reputations.

In case you haven’t noticed, the field of Democratic candidates for president next year has gotten a little crowded.

According to a candidate tracker, 16 Democrats have jumped into the race already, and three more, including Joe Biden, are likely to join.

That’s a lot of candidates to keep track of — and since California’s presidential primary is now on March 3 instead of in June, the 14 million people eligible to vote in the Democratic primary here have an even louder voice than they’ve had in years.

I checked in with Karen Skelton, a Democratic consultant based in Sacramento, to see how she thought things were shaking out so far.

“I’m actually mesmerized by the possibilities in front of us,” she said, “because it’s such a big state and we haven’t gone early for so long.”

That means, she said, more of the candidates will have to be visible in a geographically vast state — not as simple as taking a quick swing through Iowa or New Hampshire. It’s less likely that the field will have narrowed to two or three candidates by the time California’s primary rolls around.

And in order to be seen, Skelton said, the candidates will have to spend.

“Huge amounts of money,” she said. “Like $10 million here can buy you four states of media elsewhere.”

And candidates who don’t have as much experience campaigning in deep blue but deeply diverse California will need to micro-target groups of Democratic voters.

“You’re not just going, ‘I’m on the left,’” she said of the candidates. “You’re like, ‘I’m going for the Asian Pacific Islander vote. I’m going for the rural Latino vote. I’m going for the coastal vote north of Riverside County, south of Santa Monica.’”

Of course, Skelton said, Sen. Kamala Harris “has an enormous advantage.”

Harris and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont have both previously campaigned throughout California, so they have edges in the Golden State, she said.

Still, nothing’s a sure bet when the field’s this wide open.

As The New York Times’ Lisa Lerer wrote, we’re currently in the throes of a “Buttigieg Boomlet,” referring to Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. And Skelton said that for Beto O’Rourke, focusing his efforts on his giant, fast-growing home state of Texas could be a smart strategy.

A recent Quinnipiac University national poll showed Harris trailing Biden, Sanders and O’Rourke.

And at home, Harris doesn’t exactly have unqualified support.

While a new poll from the Public Policy Institute of California found that 54 percent of likely Democratic voters thought Harris should run for president, her approval rating as a senator was 48 percent among all likely voters, which was the same as the number for Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/us/kamala-harris-democrat-presidential-primary-march.html" id="2825a25f-f58e-3833-a461-90c031d4d6ff">The New York Times</a>.

Is Harris California's Presidential Front-Runner?

It’s Major League Baseball’s opening day.

Up and down the state, fans will head to ballparks to see their favorite players, sample the latest food innovations, drink craft brews and take in some fresh air (weather permitting).

For David Rinetti, first pitch will be both the end of a sprint and the beginning of a marathon.

“I’m not lying when I tell you I probably have about 50 things going on at once,” he said Wednesday morning.

Rinetti is the vice president of stadium operations for the Oakland Athletics. He’s been in that job since 1994, but started with the team as a high schooler.

“My job was to pass out a sporting newspaper that had Billy Martin on the front cover of it to our fans,” he said. “My first day of work was passing those out on opening night in 1981.”

Suffice to say, things are different. The A’s started sharing the stadium with the Oakland Raiders in 1995, meaning a not insignificant part of Rinetti’s job became running the stadium’s changeovers from football to baseball.

As the team inches toward a new waterfront stadium, I talked with Rinetti about what it takes to get the 50-year-old Oakland Coliseum ready for the season, and what he’ll miss most about the Brutalism exemplar.

So you’ve been around for a while. Tell me about how your job has changed since 1994.

It’s changed significantly based upon a lot of the security things. After 9/11, security procedures changed significantly. And then after the Boston Marathon bombing, it changed again, because the league required all teams to do metal detection.

How long do the changeovers take, and how many people are involved?

My guess is probably close to 100 people that are involved to switch things around. It really depends on how much time we have to get to the next event.

The quickest turnaround that I recall was in 2013. We had a playoff game against the Tigers here, Game 2 of the American League division series on a Saturday and the game ended probably close to 10 p.m. that night and the Raiders had a game the next night at 8 p.m. I think they were done in somewhere around 12 hours.

Anything you think you’d miss?

I’ve been there my entire adult life there you know. So it’s been my life. So I’ll miss it because it’s really been my house for all these years. There’s people associated with the different teams that we share the facility with who won’t be there anymore.

Do you have a favorite spot in the ballpark?

For me personally, it would be right behind the backstop close to the dugout. And it is something that’s unique to only our ballpark. I don’t think there’s any ballpark left that has a walkway from the clubhouse to the dugout that you actually walk by fans. Now, most, if not all have a tunnel from the clubhouse down to the dugout.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/us/oakland-coliseum-athletics-rinetti-opening-day.html" id="3c9e43ad-5687-30a6-a578-f3a6d2bccaee">The New York Times</a>.

It's Opening Day. He Made Sure Oakland Coliseum Was Ready.

Monday Cupertino, California, got the kind of fevered coverage usually reserved for the unveiling of Apple’s latest gadget. But this time, the product wasn’t a watch or a phone.

During the two-hour event at the Steve Jobs Theater on Apple’s campus, the company’s leaders detailed its plans to take on Hollywood by creating its own TV shows and documentaries. They also announced a news subscription service and a credit card.

Yes, big-name celebrities like Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon were on hand for the spectacle. But tech watchers were also paying close attention because the announcements are part of a major shift for the Silicon Valley mammoth.

Q: Why is this such a big deal?

A: Apple has spent a decade establishing its dominant place in consumers’ pockets by getting them hooked on iPhones. But after years of record-breaking profits, phone sales are slowing and the company is facing intense competition from the likes of Amazon and Netflix.

So, instead of betting on another gadget, Apple made clear Monday that it is “trying to make sure you never leave all those Apple devices you have acquired over the years,” as Daisuke Wakabayashi and John Koblin reported for The New York Times.

That means Apple is bulking up on content and services, and focusing less on hardware.

Not that there isn’t a lot of Apple hardware already out there: The company counts roughly 1.4 billion active devices as the perfect vehicles for its new content.

Q: What’s this about more subscription services?

A: First, there was Apple TV Plus, the video streaming service, which will have original programs and will include shows from networks like HBO, Showtime and CBS. Beyond that, details were sparse. No price was given.

But, as The New York Times’ Edmund Lee explained, one thing’s for sure: You won’t be able to get your favorite Netflix shows.

There was more on Apple News Plus, which was described as the “Netflix of news,” but it also raised questions about Apple’s place in an information ecosystem that’s been brutal to existing publishers.

A subscription will cost $9.99 per month. It will let subscribers read 300 magazines as well as articles from newspapers including The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Executives with The Journal said they’ll hire new staff members to write content that’s exclusive to the Apple app, which Bloomberg described as a risky move that could “cannibalize existing readership.”

Neither The Times nor The Washington Post has signed on.

Apple also announced a video game subscription service, Apple Arcade, which is set to start this fall.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/us/apple-streaming-hollywood-news-plus.html" id="f88c8fdd-b82b-307e-a1b1-0bfa4b6ee8f6">The New York Times</a>.

Why Apple's Big Streaming Play Matters

But if you’ve ever taken a college-entrance exam — with all the attendant security precautions — you may be wondering how that would actually work. Jennifer Medina of The New York Times recently went to a West Hollywood school to find out.

On an early morning in June 2017 a teenage girl got on a plane in San Jose and flew to Los Angeles, arriving at a testing center in West Hollywood to take a college-entrance exam.

Her parents, Elizabeth and Manuel Henriquez, a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager, had hand-picked the testing site.

While most students take their entrance exams at large public high schools near their homes, the Henriquezes chose a private institution, the West Hollywood College Preparatory School.

It was one of two testing sites where Singer cultivated relationships with test administrators who would accept bribes, according to court documents. For $10,000 per test, and sometimes more, the documents say, Igor Dvorskiy ensured that students could be given answers from the proctor.

Federal prosecutors say that’s what happened when the Henriquezes’ daughter arrived.

On a visit this week, nothing at the school suggested it was the site of one of the biggest testing scandals in decades. It is tucked inside a small building of a large old synagogue. The entrance to the school is a solitary white door with a small blue sign emblazoned with its name.

The school’s website describes it as offering a “'cradle-to-college’ education by providing a family-like nurturing academic environment with small class sizes.” Dvorskiy is listed as the director of the school.

The court documents make clear that federal investigators closely monitored the school for several months, tracking Dvorskiy on the days of the college entrance exams with Singer’s clients.

Typically, Singer would tell his clients “fabricate a reason — such as a bar mitzvah or a wedding — that their children purportedly needed to take the test in Houston or West Hollywood instead of at their own schools,” according to court documents.

“The extent of the fraud that took place at this testing center should be a major red flag to the College Board,” said Alexis Redding, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied college admissions. “There has always been tremendous variability in the quality and professionalism of testing sites and that opens the door for cheating to occur. Students tend to know which sites have inattentive proctors or lax policies.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/west-hollywood-school-admissions-scandal.html" id="a3240135-3ee7-3e29-a985-105689c7b20f">The New York Times</a>.

If you’ve been following the college admissions scandal, you’ll recall that one of the alleged schemes carried out by William Singer, the figure at the center of the investigation, and the parents he worked for, was faking standardized test results.

The West Hollywood School Where Proctors Are Suspected of Giving Test Answers

On Wednesday, in the midst of the fallout from the latest in a line of recent scandals to roil the University of Southern California, its leaders introduced a new president.

Carol Folt, who most recently served as the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will take the helm on July 1, becoming the first woman to permanently be USC’s president; she follows Wanda Austin, who served in an interim capacity.

Folt is a native of Akron, Ohio, but she first came to California for college, where she went to Santa Barbara City College and then transferred to UC Santa Barbara. Later, she earned her doctorate at UC Davis.

Her first jobs as a professor and university administrator were at Dartmouth. But her time at North Carolina has drawn the most attention until now.

During her tenure there, Folt grappled with two controversies that drew national scrutiny: an academic scandal involving student-athletes, and the fate of the Confederate monument known as “Silent Sam.” (The athletics controversy began before Folt’s stint as chancellor, but the university faced the fallout while she was in office.)

The monument provoked years of acrimony in Chapel Hill, where protesters toppled part of it last August. She later announced her resignation — and the removal of the monument’s remnants.

The New York Times talked to Folt on Wednesday about what she had learned from those past experiences and how she planned to rebuild trust in a troubled institution. Our interview has been edited and condensed for length.

Q: How does it feel to be coming back to California?

A: My husband and I came and we went up to Griffith Park, and you’re having this phenomenal flower bloom in California that I have taught about in the past, so getting to go up there, looking out over the whole area, seeing some of these blooms and some of the greenest foothills I have ever seen. We went, OK, it’s great to feel at home.

Q: You’re coming in on the heels of the admissions scandal and a series of other challenges. Do you think USC has a systemic corruption problem and if so, how would you address that?

A: When I look at USC, I see so much that is opportunity. I see the $320 million in grants-in-aid, one of the largest financial aid pools in the country. I see incredible faculty, with Nobel laureates and Genius awards, making discoveries that are changing health care, and I see a student body that is outstanding.

I look at that and I’m thinking we are a large, complex organization and we have challenges. Every campus president has to handle tough issues because every university has them.

I look at it in that context and I say, OK, we have to get this right. Now what has really been encouraging to me is there hasn’t been a person I have met who has not said we have the ambition to get this right. You can have all the great things in the world, but if you’re not ready to face change and make changes that are necessary, you won’t succeed.

Q: Are there any specific transparency changes that you’ll make right off the bat?

A: I’m a scientist and a researcher so I’m going to do what I have always done: I’m going to gather the facts. So it can’t be any faster than it takes to make thoughtful decisions.

I did learn at UNC that when people came together to make reforms, they have such a stronger likelihood of being successful. There is nothing more compelling to people than being part of a solution exercise that really works.

You do that once, it’s easier to do that a second time and a third time.

Q: What would you say to any student — and I’m thinking particularly of students from less represented groups on campus — what would you say to reassure them that the admissions process is fair?

A: I think what we have to say is we’re doing everything we can to make sure that process is really fair. We’ve been raising as much funding as we can to make sure we can become affordable.

The diversity of the undergraduate body is fantastic — that includes first-generation, Pell Grant, students that are veterans — and we want to see that even grow.

Having come from a community college in California and transferring to a university, I am so excited about the capacity of this university to bring students to transfer in is so strong and I want to make sure every one of those transfer students has the exact same opportunity as every other student.

These are some things that we want to do and I would love to go and talk to students about it. Every student should be reassured that a degree from USC remains extremely valuable and is very positively viewed in the world. But that doesn’t mean that we are where we want to be and we can’t make changes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/university-of-southern-california-president-carol-folt.html" id="4c2d74ab-1424-3da8-ae48-1f6fb6e85f7a">The New York Times</a>.

'We Have to Get this Right.' A Conversation With USC's Incoming President

We’d been waiting for hours in a drab beige hallway, hunched over phones or laptops, when we were herded into a windowless courtroom and packed into pew-style seats.

And then, there she was, actress Lori Loughlin. She wore large glasses and a cream mockneck sweater. She sat behind a pane of glass, alongside federal agents and a few other people accused of committing crimes against the United States.

Loughlin had surrendered to authorities in Los Angeles earlier in the day, after she and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, were charged as part of a vast college admissions fraud investigation that has ballooned into a national scandal.

Prosecutors have alleged that Loughlin and Giannulli, who appeared in court on Tuesday, paid $500,000 in bribes to get their two daughters accepted as recruits for the rowing team at the University of Southern California, even though neither took part in the sport.

On Wednesday, at the Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, Loughlin appeared before a judge for the first time. The hearing, in which she agreed to post a $1 million bond secured by her home, lasted just minutes. Such is the peculiar phenomenon of a celebrity court appearance.

Outside the courtroom, I met Mona S. Edwards, who’s been working as a courtroom sketch artist for about three decades. She started as a fashion illustrator, which she said was good training for observing what people wear and how they move.

Loughlin, for instance, wasn’t arrested at home without warning. So it was no accident, Edwards said, that she chose a white sweater. The actress had stood with her arms crossed, obscured by her lawyer.

Though she didn’t have as much time to sketch as she has in full trials, Edwards said the day was the same as any: unpredictable.

“The thing is, I’m always ready,” she told me later. “I never know if I have five minutes or an hour.”

After Loughlin’s appearance, most of the couple dozen reporters filed back into the hall. That’s when Stephen Semprevivo was called.

Semprevivo is an outsourcing executive from Los Angeles and another parent charged in the case. He wore a white button-down shirt, open at the collar, and looked glumly toward his wife, who was seated in the courtroom.

Loughlin had already agreed to the million-dollar bail, but Semprevivo’s lawyers asked for their client’s to be set at a quarter of that.

But Alex Wyman, an assistant U.S. attorney, argued that the defendant had been accused of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and the bail amount needed to be significant enough to make an impression.

So the judge set it at $1 million, too. Both Semprevivo and Loughlin are due in court in Boston later this month.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/us/california-celebrity-court-lori-loughlin-college-scandal.html" id="ec2854aa-b8ba-3de1-ad99-101beab11e5c">The New York Times</a>.

Lori Loughlin, Now Appearing in Court

On Monday, more details emerged about the victims and gunman in a shooting that turned the closing hours of the Gilroy Garlic Festival — usually a time for locals to reconnect and for tourists to get a taste of a unique tradition — into a scene of chaos and panic.

As has become routine in mass shootings, details trickled out in the hours that followed the first, often confusing, reports. Here’s a quick update on what we’ve learned.

The Victims

Three people were killed and 12 were injured in the shooting, which authorities said Monday would have been more deadly had officers not responded in less than a minute.

Two children were among the dead: Stephen Romero, a 6-year-old from San Jose, California, who was remembered as a sweet, playful boy. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that his uncle called him “El Romantico,” because of his polished manners, penchant for pressed shirts and cologne, and his love of music by The Weeknd.

Multiple outlets reported that the Santa Clara County coroner’s office identified the second child as Keyla Salazar, 13. According to The Mercury News, she was anticipating turning 14 and hoped to become an animator.

The Rochester Democrat &amp; Chronicle reported that the president of Keuka College confirmed that Trevor Irby, 25, was the third person killed. He was a biology major who graduated from the school in the Finger Lakes region of New York a couple of years ago.

The Gunman

Gilroy authorities identified the gunman, who was killed by police not long after he started shooting, as Santino William Legan, a 19-year-old resident of the town.

Police said that Legan’s motive was still unknown and that the targets appeared to be random — although officials said it was too early in the investigation to say for sure.

Separately, Chief Scot Smithee of the Gilroy Police Department said a 20-year-old man was taken into custody. But authorities said they determined he wasn’t involved in the shooting.

The Weapon

Authorities said it was a semi-automatic rifle that Legan had purchased legally in Nevada.

Jill Cowan

Articles written by the author

Flames Return to Where California's Largest Wildfire Started

The Internet at 50: 'We Didn't See the Dark Side Emerging'

Compton Earthquake Rattles the Los Angeles Area

How California's 'Demonized' Winds Shape Wildfire Season

Is Harris California's Presidential Front-Runner?

It's Opening Day. He Made Sure Oakland Coliseum Was Ready.

Why Apple's Big Streaming Play Matters

The West Hollywood School Where Proctors Are Suspected of Giving Test Answers

'We Have to Get this Right.' A Conversation With USC's Incoming President

Lori Loughlin, Now Appearing in Court

California Today: Updates on the Gilroy Shooting

The Kern River Can Be Deadly. Here's How to Stay Safe.

Here's What's Next for the LA Music Tastemaker Jason Bentley

Why More California Homeowners Are Losing Their Insurance

Who Got Into the University of California?

Everything You Need to Know for a Road Trip Up the California Coast

Can California Curb Police Shootings?

A Bel-Air Mansion, a Raid and 1,000 Guns

California Today: What to Watch When Uber Goes Public

Rising Gas Prices Compound Camp Fire Survivors' Problems