Susan Valot

A slow-motion landslide that’s damaged homes and led to the closure of more than half the hiking trails in Portuguese Bend Reserve, the large and popular recreation area on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, shows no signs of stopping.

In fact, after creeping quietly along during the many recent years of drought, the land movement sped up after last winter’s heavy rains.

Forecasters predict another wet winter ahead, fueled by El Niño, and the city of Rancho Palos Verdes is already preparing.

The 1964 B-movie “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” is so terrible that it garners a 2.7-star rating on IMDB and regularly makes lists of the worst movies ever made. One IMDB reviewer described it as “something this stunningly terrible simply had to be done on purpose … I could not make a worse movie if I spent absolutely no time at all making it.”
Yet every year, people pack the cozy Maverick Theater in Fullerton during the holiday season to see a campy stage production of the movie.

If you see someone with a net staring into a flowering bush this summer, there’s a good chance they’re counting bumble bees. About 500 volunteers are spending time in parks, reserves and backyards looking for bumble bees.

It’s part of the California Bumble Bee Atlas, a survey to figure out what kind of bumble bees are congregating where.

About 1,000 people converged on Manzanar National Historic Site in California last weekend for the 54th annual pilgrimage to honor the Japanese Americans who were held here during World War II.

“The Manzanar pilgrimage gives life to this notion that there’s a power of place,” says Bruce Embrey, whose mother was an organizer of the first official pilgrimage in 1969. “It’s an extremely powerful place to be. You can sense its history.”

Hilda Fogelson remembers Berlin fondly although she left in 1939. As an 13-year-old, she boarded a ship bound for the United Kingdom without her family, part of a rescue mission for about 10,000 Jewish children in Nazi-occupied areas known as Kindertransport.

On that same ship was toddler Michael Wolf, who escaped from Germany. They finally met for the first time this year, more than 80 years later.

After a financial crisis in late 2019 and a temporary loss of volunteers during the pandemic, these days the Marine Mammal Care Center Los Angeles in San Pedro is a hub of activity where veterinarians treat sick and injured marine animals from throughout LA County.

Even though this is the slower time of year for the center, it’s cacophonous with about a dozen California sea lions, elephant seals and northern fur seals.

Tucked away in a low-slung, cream-colored building in the Eastside neighborhood of El Sereno, a group of train enthusiasts has created an enormous wonderland of tiny trains.
The Pasadena Model Railroad Museum fills a 5,000 square foot space full of mountains, lakes, train stations and towns, all made painstakingly by hand.

Veterinarians use fish skins to successfully treat a mountain lion injured in the Bobcat Fire. The animal was then re-released into the wild, becoming the first mountain lion to be captured, rehabilitated and re-released in California. It was all part of a new program called the Wildlife Disaster Network, designed to be a way for people to help wild animals injured in wildfires and disasters in California.

When October’s Silverado Fire burned 12,466 acres, it ripped through Auga Chinon Canyon, an area where crews had just finished spending years on an ecological restoration. The fire wiped out their work, but might give hints as to which restoration methods really work to restore native California habitat.

Before the Bobcat Fire ripped through the San Gabriel Mountains in September, Big Santa Anita Canyon, with its lush creek and shady live oaks, was an idyllic getaway for thousands of Southern California locals. The lucky ones owned one of the 81 historic cabins here, on land rented in 20-year increments from the U.S. Forest Service. Some of those cabin owners returned after the fire to discover whether their cabins had survived.

Here's a story about how the film industry helped change the way baseball does business.

"I didn’t think it was going to be such a big deal," Paul Pettit says. "I mean, over the years, it just keeps coming back."

It’s been nearly two years since the Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting in Las Vegas. A lone gunman firing from a high-rise hotel shot and killed 58 people. More than 850 people were wounded. It all happened just around the time that the Las Vegas Golden Knights were beginning their inaugural season in the NHL.

And sometimes you can find community in the least likely of places.

During World War II, a Los Angeles Police Sergeant took a group of kids to Manzanar, the Japanese-American internment camp along the eastern Sierra Nevada in California. The several trips opened eyes and hearts, but also stirred controversy. After a tip from a park ranger about the story, reporter Susan Valot used scrapbook photos from Manzanar to track down the only remaining participant in the group.

For decades, the U.S. has led covert campaigns abroad. These campaigns—spearheaded by the CIA, among others—have shaped the balance of power in the world. The U.S. has even helped topple foreign governments. In this new interview, Lindsay chats with Stephen Kinzer, an author who's written extensively about America's foreign policy, and the way our government's actions have had unintended consequences. (Susan Valot produced this episode.)

Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, will break the mold this year, as the pandemic sends retailers scrambling for new ways to bring in customers while minimizing large crowds. But the changes to American shopping habits predate the pandemic. Host David Brown talks with Business Insider retail correspondent Madeline Stone about what to expect from a COVID Christmas and which changes to our spending habits are likely to stick. (Susan Valot produced this episode.)