District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis has been insistent about her claim that she barely knew the Mexican moneyman who’s accused of illegally bankrolling her campaign and others. But newly disclosed evidence challenges her story.
She gave the man a nickname, talked to him on a conference call and emailed her staff to tell them about his “request that Dumanis use his preferred political consultant during her ill-fated 2012 mayoral campaign,” VOSD’s Liam Dillon reports. Dumanis, who isn’t accused of any wrongdoing herself, didn’t have much to say in response to the details, which appears in documents filed in federal court.
On top of the newly revealed dealings with Mexican businessman José Susumo Azano Matsura, Dumanis also met with Azano and Sheriff Bill Gore, received a gift basket from Azano and wrote a college letter of recommendation for Azano’s son.
Legal Roundup: 4 Wannabe City Attorneys
• The U-T checks in on the four candidates running to replace City Attorney Jan Goldsmith in 2016. It’s “a highly competitive contest featuring a longtime local prosecutor, a member of Goldsmith’s staff and two attorneys known for public service work.
• “UC San Diego has sued USC and a nationally recognized Alzheimer’s disease researcher, alleging that they illegally conspired to take federal funding, data and employees from a UC San Diego study center on the illness,” the L.A. Times reports.
• On the state law front, the L.A. Times says a bill to “allow terminally ill people to end their lives with a doctor’s help” is floundering in Sacramento thanks to “a handful of Southern California Democrats, mostly Latinos under pressure from the Catholic Church,” who won’t support it. One opponent is local Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, whose office says she’s against it “based on personal experience.”
• The SDPD officer who shot and killed a man in a confrontation last week wasn’t wearing a body camera because he hadn’t been issued one yet. (Fox 5)
• The AP reports on the status of the San Diego parents of James Holmes, the local native who’s accused of the 2012 movie theater massacre in Colorado: “They show up in court every day, a visible reminder to jurors that even a killer has parents who love him and who don’t want him to die. But more than two months into his mass-murder trial, James Holmes has yet to turn around in his seat and acknowledge them.”
Tap Water Keeps Feeding Ponds
• San Diego keeps dumping tap water into the city’s municipal ponds, even the lily pond at Balboa Park, to the tune of 57 million gallons a year. An alternative would be to use recycled water, but the city hasn’t figured out how to do that for these ponds. (U-T)
• Water rates are going up around the state even as people use less water. Why? Because water departments say they still have to pay for overhead. (AP)
• Poway is getting more national attention for dumping a half-million gallons of water that went bad (yes, this is a thing that can happen) because the city saved too much water. (Time)
Dog Gone? Shelters Get Influx
Dozens of dogs ran away from home during the July 4 fireworks and landed in local animal shelters. You can peruse pictures of the pooches here and here.
• A Zonie spotted a skateboarding bulldog named Angus in Mission Beach and just had to write about it for the Phoenix newspaper for some reason. Canine fun fact: “It turns out bulldogs are quite good at skateboarding because they have wide bodies and a low center of gravity.” Huh. Tell that to the skinny-jean types who skateboard around town.
S.D. Online: When Sparks Flew
• We’ve posted an amazing photo of surfers in the water watching the July 4 fireworks show in Ocean Beach. The photo was taken by local resident Veronica Lynne.
• Late-night TV host Conan O’Brien is in town to broadcast from Comic-Con, and he took a moment to tweet a photo of him sitting at a bus stop with a poster about his Comic-Con appearances behind him. Nice shoes!
• Speaking of the Comic-Con — and everybody will be speaking of the Comic-Con for the next several days — the blog i09 has a huge post explaining the ins and outs of staying in San Diego, getting around and attending the event.
There’s lots of information here that will be new to locals, like details about the hotel and parking lotteries (and here you might have thought hotels have been having a tough time). And then there are the facts that will be obvious to anyone who’s visited the Convention Center. One of them: The food options there are just plain terrible. Put in a Chipotle and all will be forgiven. That is, if the wi-fi works.
S.D.’s Soccer Fever
San Diegans are big fans of women’s soccer, or at least bigger fans than other American places: We had the third-highest local TV rating for Sunday’s game, topped by only St. Louis and Kansas City. (NPR)
Oh Cluck It, Says New Yorker
Here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to ever write: The San Diego Chicken has appeared in a New Yorker cartoon. It pictures him at a bar counter saying, “I was a weirdo in this town before anyone heard of Comic Con.”
You and me both, Chicken. You and me both.
Randy Dotinga is a freelance contributor to Voice of San Diego and national president of the 1,200-member American Society of Journalists and Authors (asja.org). Please contact him directly at randydotinga@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/rdotinga.