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In early March of 1915 news broke in El Paso that Leonard Worcester Jr., a leading mining executive in the border region, was being held in a Chihuahua jail without trial or release on bond. Officials loyal to Francisco “Pancho” Villa had accused Worcester of defrauding a Mexican company related to a shipment of zinc, a charge without merit. While struggling to convince Mexican officials of his innocence, Worcester found himself in the middle of a maelstrom of economic interests, foreign diplomacy, and revolution that engulfed the U.S.-Mexico border region after 1910. Worcester’s 1939 memoir of his “aimless” life describes an important period in U.S. and Mexican history from the perspective of an American miner, musician, and entrepreneur running counter to the bombast of boosters promoting Manifest Destiny. Introduced, edited, and annotated by Andrew Offenburger, Worcester’s first-person account details the expansion of the American West, mining and la
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This is the Jan. 14, 2021, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
As rooftop solar power has gotten cheaper and more useful a topic I wrote about last week a powerful industry has pushed back. I’m talking about utilities, the state-sanctioned monopolies that build poles and wires and sell us electricity from centralized power plants, earning large guaranteed profits in the process.
Jonathan Scott is no fan of that industry.
If you haven’t spent much time watching HGTV and full disclosure, I have not Scott co-hosts “Property Brothers,” which features him and his twin brother, Drew, buying and renovating houses on a budget. He’s also a Las Vegas resident who put solar panels on his home and got pretty pissed when state officials allowed a monopoly utility owned by Warren Buffett to gut its “net metering” program, which compensates s
FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
Op-Ed: These two peaks in the San Gabriel Mountains honor racists. They must be renamed [Los Angeles Times]
In 1952, Californians met atop a peak in the San Gabriel Mountains and christened it Mt. Burnham. They were posthumously honoring Frederick Russell Burnham, a Pasadena resident who had risen to fame as a soldier of fortune in southern Africa.
Strangely enough, this wasn’t the only mountain in the region with an African connection. In 1931, Burnham himself had organized a state ceremony to name a summit a mile away in honor of Robert Baden-Powell, a defender of the English crown in southern Africa and founder of the modern scouting movement.