April 2019

Turn out the lights at Stone Brewing Berlin

Today, Tuesday April 30, 2019, marks the end of the much ballyhooed Stone Brewing Berlin campaign. After six years of planning and three years of operation, Stone Brewing yields its grounds at Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens Berlin to Brewdog, a Scottish craft beer company. In 2010, according to Reid Ramsey, founder of Beer Street Journal, Stone’s co-founder walked thorough the gasworks property and…


No more Del Mar gun sales shows for you

The California Assembly voted Thursday, April 25 to ban gun and ammunition sales at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in San Diego County, one of two legislative efforts to ban gun shows on state property. Assembly members Todd Gloria, D-San Diego, and Tasha Boerner-Horvath, D-Encinitas, introduced the bill in February. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, added her name as a co-author earlier this month. The bill…


Destination limbo: Health suffers among Tijuana asylum seekers at border shelter

Immigrants from Mexico and Central America seeking asylum in the United States frequently end up at border shelters in Tijuana, Mexico. They stay in them for weeks as they wait for the U.S. government to approve or deny their applications. Most of the refugees get sick during their journeys due to insufficient food, a lack of clean water and poor sanitation at camps and shelters…


Duncan Hunter’s military justice Bizarro World

In this week’s episode of backwards military justice practice, Representative Duncan Hunter Jr., has continued his pattern of interfering with the administration of justice in the court-martial case of accused war criminal US Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher. If being a federally-indicted vaping Congressman weren’t enough to solidify his place on the list of most clueless and corrupt in Congress, Hunter has set…


Of lawsuits, sewage, Valiano and Escondido

(Margaret McCown Liles started blogging about the Escondido City Council following the demise of the North County Times as a public resource. Please visit her blog at http://ablueviewescondido.com.) The council chambers were full at last Wednesday’s city council meeting (April 10, 2019.) This was due to the attendance of the winners and their families of the city’s Earth Day Poster contest. The contest is really…


How dumb is Duncan Hunter? Don’t ask.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Vapeville) pretended to cross the Mexico border, and in the process got called out by his Democratic challenger, Ammar Campa-Najjar. Najjar said that if Hunter actually were crossing the border, it would violate his parole while awaiting federal trial for allegedly spending at least $250,000 of campaign funds on personal expenses. “The congressman and his wife, who at times also served as…


Bringing the Mexico border closer to home

Many if not most Americans have never crossed the U.S. border with Mexico by land or spent any time in that region. This unfamiliarity can make it easy for politicians to distort what’s going on there and hard for immigration advocates and social movements to muster support for their primary goal: making U.S. policies toward undocumented people and asylum-seekers more humane. What can advocates for…


Kids are the grownups in climate crisis room

The next U.S. presidential election is being transformed because children everywhere, watching in disbelief as grownups fail to address the climate crisis, are launching their own climate movements. In contrast to the 2016 election – where exactly zero questions about global warming were posed during the general election debates – the lineup of presidential candidates are already being pressured to do something about the climate…


North County mixed bag: Buses, rents, beer

Buses to nowhere North County Transit District is eliminating about 90 bus stops from the more than 1,800 stops on 30 routes in its Breeze service area in April. Most of the bus stops to be discontinued have fewer than five daily riders, fail to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and have other stops within walking distance, said Kimberly Hayford, the transit district’s…


Escondido mosque arson investigation yields more questions than answers and a reward

Authorities said this week they had not ruled out anything when it comes to who started a small fire at Escondido’s Dar-ul-Arqam Mosque at 318 W. Sixth Ave. around 3:15 a.m. Sunday, March 24. Believed to be arson, a suspect reportedly left a note referring to the shootings Friday, March  15 that killed 50 people at mosques in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. The fire…