Jail employees will now be screened for drugs

Good Morning, I’m Debbie Cruz….it’s Friday, July 12th.

Visitors and employees will now be screened for drugs at County jails.

More on that next. But first... let’s do the headlines….

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria announced 20-million dollars in funding for Bridge to Home … an affordable housing program.

Bridge to Home helps developers finance affordable housing projects.

The 20-million announced Thursday is earmarked for new construction, site clearance and site improvements.

The city said the program has already provided 66 million dollars in funding.

The city of San Diego announced more than 12 million dollars will be distributed to 179 arts and culture nonprofits this fiscal year.

The awards vary. For example … Cygnet Theatre is receiving more than 150-thousand dollars, while arts website Vanguard Culture is getting more than 10-thousand.

The city provides arts and culture funding each year. The amount this year is in line with the previous year. The money is generated through taxes on hotel rooms and other accommodations.

San Marcos residents will get to vote on a one-cent sales tax this November.

This week, the City Council approved adding the proposal to the General Election ballot.

The council said if passed, it’ll generate 20-million dollars in funding per year.

The money would be used for things like street and park maintenance and public safety.

The election is on November 5th. Visit kpbs dot org slash elections to learn more.

From KPBS, you’re listening to San Diego News Now. Stay with me for more of the local news you need.

VISITORS AND EMPLOYEES WILL SOON BE SCREENED FOR DRUGS WHEN THEY ENTER COUNTY JAILS.

METRO REPORTER ANDREW BOWEN SAYS THE NEW POLICY IS AN ABOUT-FACE FOR SHERIFF KELLEY MARTINEZ.

Advocates for jail safety have long been urging the Sheriff's Department to screen anyone entering the jail system — even sheriff's deputies, contractors and visitors. Screenings have previously been limited to inmates. After years of resisting those calls, Sheriff Martinez announced Thursday that expanded screenings with drug detection dogs would soon begin, unannounced and at random. I myself will go through a screening, a contraband screening, if I enter the jails, when I enter the jails. I plan to do that myself. So nobody's immune. It's from the top down. The chair of the county's Citizens' Law Enforcement Review Board praised the move, saying it would help prevent overdoses and save lives. Andrew Bowen, KPBS news.

HOTTER DAYS COULD MEAN A CALL ON CONSUMERS TO CUT BACK ON ENERGY USE. CALIFORNIA’S GRID OPERATOR WANTS CUSTOMERS TO PREPARE FOR FLEX ALERTS IF EXTREME HEAT CONTINUES.

REPORTER TANIA THORNE EXPLAINS WHAT THAT MEANS FOR SAN DIEGO.

The California Independent System Operator- or “Cal ISO” – is the agency which decides when flex alerts are needed. They typically issue flex alerts when extremely hot weather drives up electricity use, jeopardizing grid integrity. The alert is usually issued a day in advance and calls on consumers’ help… to avoid overwhelming the system. That could be as easy as you know, unplugging your phone. So it's not charging or unplugging your laptop. Not washing dishes during peak hours. So between 4 and 9 PM. Alex Welling is with SDGE. Everything that we can do to conserve energy is going to help us prevent flex alerts is going to help us prevent the possibility of rotating outages later on No flex alerts are planned at the moment but Cal ISO is asking all Californians to stay prepared and alert if conservation or rotating outages are needed. TT KPBS News,

The heat wave that has taken over much of the county is coming to an end.

But triple digits are still expected in some areas … highs from 112 to 120 are in the forecast for the mountains and deserts.

The extreme heat warning for the deserts expires tonight (Friday) at 9.

Find free A-C at cool zones dot org.

Coming up.... Behind the scenes of the Old Globe’s newest Shakespeare production. We’ll have that story and more, just after the break.

CREATURES LIVING MILES UNDER THE OCEAN MUST WITHSTAND THE KIND OF PRESSURE THAT WOULD CRUSH ONE OF US.

SCI-TECH REPORTER THOMAS FUDGE TELLS US SOME INVERTEBRATES CALLED COMB JELLIES SURVIVE IT BY FORGING A DIFFERENT KIND OF CELL.

Comb jellies, which resemble jellyfish, live in many places, and some live 8 thousand meters beneath the sea. They adapt to that massive water pressure at the molecular level by changing the shape of their lipids, which are the building blocks of cell membranes. Itay Budin is a biochemistry professor at UC San Diego who partnered in a study published in the journal Science. He describes some lipid molecules as looking like traffic cones, with a head and two chains below it that look like legs spread apart. “So what pressure does is it will actually compress those chains so that they  bunch up next to each other. So if you have a lipid that looks like a traffic cone, at huge pressure it will look like a coke can.” Jacob Winnekoff is a deep sea biochemist at Harvard who partnered with Budin. He points out lipids can't all be like coke cans. Some of them still need to be traffic cones, or if you play badminton, a shuttlecock. “So what we see, in the deep sea comb jellies, is they have a different makeup of lipids. They have rearranged some of the atoms in these lipid molecules so that even under pressure they’re still shuttlecock shaped.” Given the evolution of cell walls in deep sea comb jellies, they can’t survive in shallow ocean water. They disintegrate. 

OLD GLOBE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR BARRY EDELSTEIN HAS ADAPTED SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORICAL TRILOGY HENRY THE SIXTH INTO A TWO-PART EPIC CALLED HENRY 6.

ARTS REPORTER BETH ACCOMANDO TAKES US BEHIND THE SCENES OF THIS AMBITIOUS PRODUCTION THAT WILL COMPLETE THE GLOBE’S SHAKESPEARE CANON, AFTER ALMOST 90 YEARS.

Ever wonder what it would be like to be sitting in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and seeing one of his plays for the very first time? I love the idea that one can think about a play of Shakespeare as a new play.. And you essentially can, says the Globe’s artistic director Barry Edelstein, because Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays are so rarely produced that most people have probably never seen them. They also reveal Shakespeare as a young playwright trying to make a name for himself. And it's this sense of, look at me, watch me flex my muscles as a writer and do these audacious things, which gives the production and the plays themselves this great energy and this great sort of youthful exuberance. Edelstein’s work began almost a decade ago when he decided to adapt the Bard’s historical trilogy into a more manageable two-part play rechristened Henry 6. The three plays tell one story of the reign of the English king Henry VI, which was in the 15th century, during which there was a dynastic struggle, a civil war, between two families, the house of York and the House of Lancaster. It’'s an epic tale about power, politics and people who are driven more by personal ambition than by idealism. Mostly Shakespeare has this notion that politics, divorced from values, can only go in one direction, which is violence… When people dispense with a sense of the greater good, a sense of the public good, and look only for their own personal power, inevitably chaos and violence results… And so, yeah, Shakespeare always seems to be 400 years ahead of himself. Because he understood how human nature results in history repeating itself says actress Elizabeth A. Davis. I don't know if that should horrify us or comfort us… but I think that it speaks to Shakespeare's brilliance that we are still coming back to the humanity that he gives us or the lack thereof. Davis plays Margaret of Anjou, a French woman who married King Henry. When I look at Henry, who is called inept and weak and doesn't do what he's called upon, doesn't do what is in his charge to do, Margaret, on the page, is furious about it. Margaret does indeed step into those deficits, and she takes over and becomes, in essence, king, a functional king. Margaret displays a ferociousness in the play that earns her the title “she-wolf of France.” But Davis sees her as someone seeking security in a very dangerous political landscape. I see a woman desperate to keep her son safe and to try to keep hold of a kingdom that her husband is unable to bring together. Henry is one of Shakespeare’s most fascinating kings, says Edelstein. Henry is a religious man. Henry is a bookish man. Henry is a philosophical man. And he doesn't really like the rough and tumble of politics, and he doesn't really like the violence of war. Keshav Moodliar plays Henry. More than anything, I think of him as a kind person. But kindness doesn’t often benefit somebody in the cutthroat world of politics. His weakness, if we can say there is a weakness, is that he's not able to convince the people around him that discourse and conversation and peace, that's the way we can solve these problems. And even saying it now, it breaks my heart, because that's where we're in this country He has a line where he says, my crown is in my heart, not on my head. And I think that does capture him very beautifully in a verse line of, he embodies all those things about leadership and what it means to be a king, but in a way which you can't quite see. The plays show how political decisions by leaders affect the lives of regular people. That inspired Edelstein to create a community engagement component to the production. And we thought, maybe the regular people of San Diego can be the people who play the regular people of England. And they do both in video projected on stage and in walk on roles. The Globe also engaged people behind the scenes in workshops with the design team, which Davis loves. it's absolutely an intoxicating thing to feel as if storytelling is also care for your community. So this is, in my estimation, the ideal version of how theater functions. This community engagement involved more than a thousand people, adds Moodliar. This play has touched so many people, and so many people have touched this play that the fabric of it just extends endlessly, and that is that in and of itself is beautiful. It’s also exciting to see how a playwright who’s been dead for more than four centuries can still connect with people. And Henry 6 may resonate particularly well with audiences as they go to the polls to pick a leader. Beth Accomando, KPBS News.

TAG: The Henry 6 plays are running now through September at the Old Globe’s Lowell Davies Festival Theatre.

That’s it for the podcast today. This podcast is produced by Emilyn Mohebbi and edited by Brooke Ruth. We had help from producer Lara McCaffrey and reporter John Carroll this week. As always you can find more San Diego news online at KPBS dot org. And now you can find our Comic-Con coverage at kpbs dot org backslash comiccon. I’m Debbie Cruz. Thanks for listening and have a great weekend.