Author: JohnValbyNation

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Wednesday, Dec. 18, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. Newsletter Get our Essential California newsletter After much hand-wringing — and a successful bargaining session between a campus food-services contractor and a powerful service-workers union — Thursday’s Democratic debate in Los Angeles is back on at Loyola…

SERIES Survivor The unscripted series ends a season that developed its own scandal after accusations from contestant Kellee Kim and others that one of the contestants, Dan Spilo, was doing some “inappropriate touching” during the competition. The two-hour season finale will be followed by a one-hour reunion special. 8 and 10 p.m. CBS The Masked…

The year-end lists are in; 2019, neatly wrapped up. Once upon a time, Beethoven’s birthday (the indestructible composer turned 249 on Monday) traditionally was an artistic no-news period. But not this year in classical music. Not here, anyway, thanks to Wild Up, which is wildly up to its usual reinvention — innovation being too tame…

Few people remember Richard Jewell as the hero that he was. “Richard Jewell,” written by Billy Ray and directed by Clint Eastwood, aims to right that wrong. In Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics, as a security guard at Centennial Olympic Park, Jewell saved countless lives by moving a crowd of people away from a suspicious…

So many wineries, so little time. Napa Valley’s vine-covered hillsides stretched before us as photographer Jim Edwards and I drove along the region’s central artery, California 29, a two-lane ribbon of asphalt that borders vineyards of some of the best-known wineries in America — Mondavi, Inglenook, Beringer, Beaulieu. I’d been in San Francisco and decided…

Save Santa from pirates, go kayaking with him and join together in song before Christmas. Oxnard Heritage Square in Oxnard transforms into a world of cookies, candy canes and colorful gumdrops for the 11th Gingerbread Fest. Go on Saturday or Sunday for a guided tour of gingerbread structures and the square’s Victorian-era homes decorated for…

Organizations representing freelance journalists are mounting a legal challenge to a new California law that aims to rein in companies’ use of independent contractors by placing certain restrictions on contract work. Under the state’s landmark labor law AB5, which goes into effect Jan. 1, news outlets can publish no more than 35 pieces per year…

MILAN, Italy —  The boards of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and PSA Peugeot on Wednesday signed a binding merger deal creating the world’s fourth-largest auto company with the scale to confront the challenges of stricter emissions regulations and the transition to new driving technologies. The companies said in a joint statement the new group will be led…

By this time of the holiday season, shopping is on a 24/7 loop. So if you get a little loopy, well, you might want to step away from the smartphone, the laptop and the credit cards. “I saw this charge come through on my PayPal and I was like ‘What did I buy?’ ” said…

In another sign that the true damage wreaked on the lives of ordinary Americans by the Trump administration takes place in the deeps of government agencies, the National Labor Relations Board has just issued a decision significantly narrowing the right of franchise workers to force big companies to take responsibility for their working conditions. The…