Student walkout protests gun violence
Good Morning, I’m Annica Colbert….it’s Wednesday June 8th>>>>
Students walk out to protest gun violence
More on that next. But first... let’s do the headlines….
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Yesterday was the California primary election and results are rolling in.
As early as this morning you may see some races called and candidates declaring victories.
But, in tight races, you could be waiting a while.
Mail in ballots can take days to trickle in.
As long as they were postmarked by 8 pm on election day they WILL be counted.
For the latest results on San Diego races go to KPBS dot org.
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Jury deliberations began yesterday in the “Fat Leonard” Navy bribery trial.
Five former officers are charged as part of a conspiracy to help contractor Leonard Francis defraud the Navy.
Defense attorneys questioned whether attending lavish parties in the western pacific amounted to bribery when so many Naval officials also attended.
Assistant US Attorney Mark Pletcher says the evidence is overwhelming….
from hundreds of pages of invoices and emails, to testimony from some of the 29 officers who have pleaded guilty over the years.
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It’s going to be hot starting tomorrow and on into the weekend.
Friday and Saturday are expected to be the hottest days.
San Diego’s desert areas will bear the brunt of it, with temperatures up to 115 degrees expected.
An excessive heat warning has been issued for the Borrego Springs area.
It’ll be in effect from 10am on Thursday to 9pm on sunday.
Inland areas are expected to be in the mid to high 80s, while areas in East County will be in the 90s.
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From KPBS, you’re listening to San Diego News Now.
Stay with me for more of the local news you need.
Students at Patrick Henry High School walked out of class at lunchtime on Tuesday and stepped into the heated gun violence debate.
KPBS Education Reporter M.G. Perez was there.
Patrick Henry High School in Del Cerro has become the center of protest and activism for many young people who want to be heard.
The lunchtime rally included hundreds of students in support of gun control reform and demanding their school be a safe space after they say they experienced a threat of their own.
Xander Carig is a senior at the school.
“when we heard yesterday there was a potential threat of a school shooting during our rally…it wasn’t impossible or far-fetched. It was way too real.”
The local students joined thousands of others around the country who walked out at the same time, prompted by the recent massacre in Uvalde, Texas and the continued body count of young victims in school shootings. MGP KPBS News
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California’s fast-food workers are walking off the job on Thursday to demand better working conditions.
The Service Employees International Union and the 'Fight for $15' campaign are organizing the strike.
They aim to raise awareness about Assembly Bill 257, which is up for a vote in the state Senate this summer.
Crystal Orozco is a fast food employee with the fight for 15 campaign….
She says A-B-257 would allow workers to talk directly with companies without fear of retaliation.
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June is Pride month but in North County, a local resource center works year round to serve, advocate and empower the LGBTQ community.
KPBS North County reporter Tania Thorne tells us more.
The North County LGBTQ resource center has been open for 10 years.
Although they are based in Oceanside, they serve all of the surrounding North County cities and offer services to everyone, not just the LGBTQ community.
“To people who need help in services navigating housing, mental health services, we also have a food distribution program thats open to everybody and we offer STI navigation and HIV testing on site free.”
That was Allan Acevedo. The center’s director of operations.
As a celebration of Pride month, Staff is prepping for their “Pride by the Beach” event this Saturday.
The family friendly event will be from NOON to 6pm near Oceanside’s Civic Center.
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The Salk Institute in La Jolla is raising money for a new building. It will be the second expansion of its campus since its founding in the early 60s.
The original Salk Institute is an icon of modern architecture.
KPBS Science and Technology reporter Thomas Fudge tells us how its design has stood up as a place to do research.
In the late 50s, Jonus Salk, famous for creating a polio vaccine, wanted to create a research institute. A site was chosen in San Diego. An architect named Louis Kahn was chosen. And it was clear that Salk wanted a building that would be, itself, a work of art.
“One of the mandates that he gave to Kahn was he wanted a place that would be worthy of a visit by Pablo Picasso.”
Greg Lemke is a professor of neurobiology at the Salk Institute, who’s also an avid follower of architecture trends. And what better place for him to work than a building whose lines and geometry, and embrace of the pacific ocean, have made it an architectural icon and a National Historic Landmark. But the things visitors don’t see are what make it a great building for science.
For instance, the skeleton of trusses that bear the building’s weight.
“There is a series of trusses that span from these towers here to the exterior stairwells. And what that means as a practical matter is that none of the interior walls of these laboratory spaces support any weight.”
And that means interior walls can be made out of drywall, that can be broken down to reconfigure spaces, or from glass to let in natural light and create an open atmosphere. Salk and his architect wanted to create a collaborative space where scientists would encounter each other and observe each other’s work. Lemke shows us a door that leads to a corridor of connected labs.
“So when you walk down this corridor you walk from one lab to the next lab to the next lab. There are no walls between them. There are no barriers. This was a unique design feature at the time.”
“The beauty of the building is that it’s now about 60 years old, and it has continued to keep pace with our changing science.”
Sreecanth Chalasani is a neurology professor at Salk who has seen the building change to meet his research needs. Once he needed a new room to accommodate lab experiments with mice. He says he talked to the Institute's facilities guys and they created a new room.
“All they had to do was stick some metal poles from the ceiling to the floor, and stick pieces of drywall in. That was it!”
Of course, in the early 60’s Salk architects couldn’t predict the future, and they couldn’t prepare for every technological change. One of them, says Chalasani, was the use of wireless technology. The poured reinforced concrete the Salk buildings are made of is great, if you want to block cell and wifi signals.
The institute has had to install more than a thousand wifi access points to address the problem.
And then there are the teak shutters and panels that Louis Kahn made as a key aspect of the building. The local environment, which includes a lot of very acidic eucalyptus trees, caused tremendous degradation.
“A lot of the spores that come off of the sap that gets suspended in the air gets out on the wood. Which then, joined with the moisture of the ocean air and whatnot creates dry rot and surface degradation.”
Tim Ball. the facilities and planning director at Salk, said it cost just under 10 million dollars to restore the teak panels.
The teak panels and shutters frame the personal study of Greg Lemke, as he opens a window with a view of the pacific ocean. He says building a place just like the original Salk buildings would be prohibitively expensive today.
There is a new building planned for the Salk campus. Ball says it will be built in the same style, lined up with original plaza and its symbolic stream, called the channel of life.
“It’ll have an open slot roof that will allow us to take the view from the sky to the sea, being transformed from a channel of life from a light and air standpoint to the water feature in the main courtyard, which is the channel of life that leads to the sea of discovery.”
Salk is fundraising for the new building now. They hope to break ground on it by the end of the year. SOQ
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Coming up.... San Diego’s international fringe festival has been going since last week. We’ll bring you more on what’s on tap for this week.That’s next, just after the break.
San Diego International Fringe Festival is at the midway point.
One show that will debut on Friday is a chamber opera called “Aftermath”
It’s at The Template in Ocean Beach.
KPBS arts reporter Beth Accomando speaks with composer Nicolas Reveles about creating an opera during the pandemic that deals with lockdown and a non-binary character.
That was Beth Accomando speaking with Nicolas Reveles.
His chamber opera Aftermath runs Friday through Sunday as part of San Diego International Fringe Festival.
For more coverage of Fringe go to K-P-B-S-dot-ORG-slash-cinema-junkie
That’s it for the podcast today. As always you can find more San Diego news online at KPBS dot org. I’m Annica Colbert. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
