Riverside County hit a major mark during the coronavirus pandemic as officials reported a total of 1,007 COVID-19 related deaths on Friday.  

Health officials reported 126 new cases of COVID-19 and 10 additional virus-related deaths on Friday.

Of those new cases, 22 were in the Coachella Valley, but none of the deaths were from here. The region’s nine cities and 11 unincorporated communities have accounted for 300 deaths in Riverside County — or 31% of the total — even though these communities have less than 18% of the county’s population.

There have been a total of 51,860 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the county.

Riverside County, with about 2...

Just last week, Facebook finally banned militia groups and pages that advocate for violence on its platform. But Recode’s quick Facebook search for “militia” groups and pages on Friday surfaced over a dozen results for national and local militia groups, most of them private, with many of them openly calling for violence against protesters.

Two of these groups that Recode accessed had a combined 25,000 members and included posts where members encouraged and celebrated shooting people involved in recent Black Lives Matter protests. Some groups did not contain “militia” in the title but still encouraged members to take up arms...

Palm Valley School in Rancho Mirage will be the first school in the Coachella Valley to reopen to students and faculty for in-person learning at its “lower school” when the doors open Sept. 8, the day after Labor Day.

Riverside County and California health officials approved the reopening Thursday, for kindergarten through sixth grade. Palm Valley School began the 2020-21 school year Wednesday with virtual learning amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The head of the school, Dr...

Californians who can’t pay rent because of the coronavirus could stay in their homes through at least Jan. 31, but only if they pay a portion of some missed payments under a proposal endorsed Friday by Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislative leaders.

The California court system has halted most eviction and foreclosure proceedings since April 6 because of the pandemic. But those protections will expire Tuesday, prompting fears of a wave of evictions in a state that already has the largest homeless population in the country.

Lawmakers have been rushing to come up with a bill to extend those eviction protections while balancing the impact on landlords, many of whom depend on rent payments to pay their mortgages. 

The proposal N...

For a long time, I had Bill and Ted mixed up in my head with the guys from Dumb and Dumber, who never really appealed to me. That may explain why I had not participated in the former duo’s excellent adventure nor their bogus journey until earlier this summer.

But in June, faced with the impending release date of the third installment in the trilogy, Bill & Ted Face the Music — three decades after the originals — I queued up the 1989 film that started it all.

And to my great joy, I loved it. It’s so charmingly weird, emitting hormonal teenage boy stoner flick vibes while somehow remaining as pure as the driven snow...

College of the Desert will begin its fall semester Monday despite experiencing a malware attack last Sunday that caused the college’s website and email system to go offline. The school is still working on resolving the issue, officials said.

The majority of classes this fall will be conducted virtually and students have been unable to access their schedules or register for new classes prior to the start of the semester.

A third-party forensic team has been approved to assist the college’s technology department to help bring systems back online. A report on the attack has also been filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a press release posted on the school’s Facebook page.

“While we cannot...

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• RYAN GINES
• Former St. Louis Alderman Larry Arnowitz was the target of a federal campaign finance investigation.

St. Louis Alderman Larry Arnowitz, who claimed he was brought down by “political people” who didn’t want him to become mayor, has been sentenced to serve twelve months in federal prison and another six months on house arrest.

The 66-year-old pleaded guilty today to one count mail fraud, admitting he siphoned $21,197.85 out of his “Friends of Larry Arnowitz” campaign and used the money for personal expenses.

Arnowitz, a Democrat, represented the 12th Ward for more than seven years before he was indicted in March 2019 and resigned. Federal prosecutors say he illegally and repeatedly tapped his campaign donations for years, starting in June 2015.

“Durin...

One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend.

At the end of High Flying Bird, a rookie NBA player receives a gift bestowed to him by his former agent: 1969’s seminal The Revolt of the Black Athlete, by sociologist and civil rights activist Harry Edwards.

It is then that the full meaning of Steven Soderbergh’s unconventional sports drama, released on Netflix in February 2019, becomes clear. In a crisp 90 minutes, the film covers thorny issues of labor and class, of dreams lost and found, of the pressure to deliver when millions of dollars, livelihoods and legacies, are on the line.

But it is also a film about Black athlete empowerment...

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As flames tore through California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, Craig Clements drove toward the fire in a specialized radar-equipped Ford pickup, watching the plume of smoke billowing from the forest.

Clements is a professor who leads San Jose State University’s Fire Weather Research Laboratory, and he chases wildfires to study their behavior.

As the late afternoon sun filtered through the smoke on Aug. 19, an orange glow enveloped the road and the forest. Ashes, oak leaves and twigs from burning fir and redwood trees rained down from the smoky sky.

Clements parked on a roadside about two miles from the active fire zone, and together with a graduate student, he turned on the generator and powered up the radar.

The radar allows...